Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 1: What Scientists, Science Writers and PIOs Should Expect From Each Other

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Matt Shipman is a public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic entomology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, where he covered the nexus of science, politics and policy. He blogs about NC State research at The Abstract, and you can follow him on Twitter where he is @ShipLives. 

Make sure you check the other posts in the series, Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist and Social Media: Taking Science To The People.

Whether you’re a scientist or a science reporter, at some point you’ll probably have to deal with a public information officer (PIO). A good PIO, or flack, can make your job easier. A bad PIO can make you want to pull your hair out. So, what makes a good science PIO?

PIOs have been the subject of some discussion recently in the science community. It started earlier this month, during the ScienceOnline2012 conference at North Carolina State University in Raleigh (where I work). During discussions about the relationship between scientists and reporters, it came to light that many PIOs who write news releases about research findings do not run those releases by the relevant researchers to ensure their accuracy. This blew the minds of some reporters, and at least one flack (me).

In the days following the conference, the revelation that PIOs are not vetting news releases led to several prominent blog posts and related conversations through social media. Even science writers who were former PIOs wanted to know what was going on.

To advance the conversation, I want to lay out some guidelines for what I think scientists, science writers and PIOs should expect from each other.

Researchers, you should expect a good PIO to give you an opportunity to review any news releases about your research. I am a flack at a large university. I write about everything from forensic anthropology to chemical engineering. It would be foolish of me to presume I could write about such a variety of topics without making a mistake. Even PIOs who focus on specific research areas make mistakes, as humans are wont to do.

As a result, I always vet my release copy with the relevant researchers. In fact, everyone in my office does. Sometimes that means we have to significantly re-write releases, and sometimes it means we go through several iterations before everyone is happy. We are, after all, writing for a lay audience. So be it. If we botch something out of carelessness, it reflects poorly on the researchers, the research and the institution. From a selfish perspective, it also hurts our reputations with researchers and reporters. We can’t afford that.

What do PIOs need from researchers? Time. Ideally, researchers will tell a PIO about forthcoming papers or conference presentations at least a week or two in advance. This gives us the opportunity to pull together a good release and issue it in a timely way. A six-week-old paper is brand new in academic terms – it hasn’t even had time to penetrate the intellectual marketplace – but if you tell most reporters that a news item is six weeks old, their eyes will glaze over and you will have trouble waking them up. This may not be true for some science beat writers, but most science news stories these days are written by general assignment reporters, and they like their news to be new.

Researchers should also remember that a news release is not an abstract. It is not being written for an audience of your peers. News releases should be written in language that is accessible to a non-expert audience. And, when reviewing a draft release, please respond to your PIO as quickly as possible. If you don’t get around to reviewing a release for a few weeks, odds are good the release will never go out – it’s no longer timely.

In addition, researchers should know that, at some point, they may have to actually talk to a reporter. A good PIO will make sure the researcher is aware of this ahead of time, and will check to see who on the research team is most comfortable serving as a spokesperson. It’s usually the lead author, but that is not always the case. If you’re a researcher, and you do not want to talk to the press, tell your PIO before the release goes out. A news release is not a news story. It’s a summary that reporters can use to determine whether they want to write a news story. If the researcher won’t answer the phone, there’s no point in issuing the release in the first place.

What should reporters expect from a good PIO? Honesty. Don’t say something is the cure for cancer, unless it is actually the cure for cancer. Science is an iterative process, and even baby steps forward can be exciting and important. Exaggerating research findings is a surefire way to annoy reporters (and researchers).

What else should a good PIO do? Be responsive. If a reporter calls you, he or she is probably on deadline. Respond to media requests quickly. And if you can’t get the reporter what he or she wants, explain that as soon as possible so the reporter can begin figuring out how to move forward.

PIOs should also know who they’re pitching. If you pitch a story about beetles to a writer who covers astrophysics, you’re wasting everyone’s time. That said, every PIO makes an off-target pitch from time to time. If that happens, reporters, please tell the PIO you don’t care about that subject  – but also tell the PIO what areas you do cover. If the PIO is any good, you will stop getting irrelevant pitches – and may even get a heads up about something you’re actually interested in.

Why do I care what people at other institutions do? One reason is because it is already difficult to get journalists and researchers to take PIOs seriously. We don’t need irresponsible behavior contributing to the problem. Another reason is that I care about science, and about communicating ideas (and context) accurately. It’s why I’m in this business (it sure isn’t for the money).

PIOs, and their employers, need to know that it is not okay to leave scientists out of the loop when we’re promoting their work. It undermines our credibility. It tells researchers we don’t care about their concerns. And it increases the likelihood that the very work we are trying to highlight will be misrepresented.

The Poisoner’s Guide to Story Telling

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Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently The New York Times best seller, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.  She also writes for publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Lapham’s Quarterly and blogs about chemistry, culture (and the occasional murder) for the Public Library of Science at Speakeasy Science, blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience.  She is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

So let me tell you the story of a suspected murder, a real one, the irresistibly tragic tale of a beautiful young actress of early 20th century Hollywood, the adventure-loving heroine of one successful film after another: Madcap Madge, The Flapper, and – what would turn out to be her last picture – Everybody’s Sweetheart.

The actress, Olive Thomas, had the look of a charming child, with a shining bob of dark, curly hair, big violet-blue eyes, and a pale, heart-shaped face. It was a look that launched her career, starting in 1914 when she’d won a “Most Beautiful Girl in New York City contest.” And it launched her marriage to a member of Hollywood’s inner circle, Jack Pickford – younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford.

The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, intense quarreling, usually over his numerous side affairs – he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them.  They separated, reunited, separated, tried again, delighting the gossip magazines. In early September 1920, the couple flew to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy time in a Prohibition-free city. At the end one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning.  As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze, when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my God, my God.”

He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on the painful sores caused by syphilis, poured a dose, and chugged it down. As the corrosive sublimate burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my God,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”

And it’s at this point, that I hope I’ve gotten you caught up in the story so that you’ll continue read on as I pause to tell you something about the poisonous element mercury – its history, its chemistry, its use in everything from thermometers to medications, it’s rather insidious poisonous effects. The fact that it’s most dangerous when part of a chemical compound, such as the bichloride of mercury (HgCl2) which makes it far more easily absorbed than in its pure, slippery and self-contained, state.

I might even tell you that by the time of the Olive Thomas test, toxicologists had developed tests sensitive enough to detect the poison in human tissues from exposures as small as .005 of a grain of mercury bichloride. And I’d even tell you about how those tests worked, the way chemists would use a deft mixture of heat, acid, and vapor to coax mercury from a tissue sample to form a thin gleaming deposit on a copper probe. And all of that would lead you back to the question of how Olive Thomas died and whether it was, as her husband insisted, an accident.

Or at least that’s what I did in my book, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, although at far greater length. The idea is to weave science through the story well enough that it’s just part of the story. A little devious, you’re thinking. I do tell stories of science more directly, for instance in a story on chemical communication in Scientific American last fall, or in my blog on chemistry and culture, Speakeasy Science. But in my last book, I wasn’t thinking so much about the already science literate audience. I was wondering about the outer circle, about whether  if I could spin a good enough story that people who don’t love chemistry at all would read the book anyway.

In fact, as my non-fiction story is set in the time period that the mystery novelist Agatha Christie started her career (debuting in 1920 with a strychnine-focused tale, The Mysterious Affair at Styles); it was Christie who I hoped to channel when writing about two crusading scientists in the early days of forensic toxicology.  I won’t tell you I pulled it off perfectly but I can tell you that The Poisoner’s Handbook was a finalist for a non-fiction Agatha award, given to favorite books of murder mystery readers. And that I talked about chemistry and poison at the annual conference of mystery writers, Malice Domestic, last spring. And that I was the only science writer in attendance.

I sometimes think of this more subtle weaving of science into a story as a kind of subversive education.  And I think it matters.  Because the audience, the one beyond the inner circle of the science literate,  matters. If we believe what we say – that science communication is important because it helps us build a community with greater understanding of research  – then we need to be creative in the ways we reach far and wide into that community. We need to care about the science disenfranchised as well as the science savvy. I don’t suggest this is the only goal of science communication or that my approach is right for every story or every book. But I will tell you that I hear from some surprising readers, mostly recently a 5th grade boy. I like connecting with that diverse audience. And that I think experimenting with telling science stories has made me better at what I do.

Or so I hope. But, as they say, enough about me.

The stricken actress lingered in the hospital for three more days after she swallowed bichloride of mercury. And during those days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them – his infidelities had driven her to suicide; Pickford had wished to get rid of her and tricked his wife into taking the poison; as the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.

The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview, with The Los Angeles Examiner, after his return to California, Pickford couldn’t stop dwelling on how much his wife had wanted to live: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”

Not the happiest of conclusions.  And it was not one that laid to rest all the doubts and whispers about Pickford. It may be one reason why he faded away as a Hollywood star. But then it’s real life with all its imperfections, not a mystery novel. And if my subversive plan worked here you read until I reached that conclusion.

 

SciWriteLabs 7.2: The New York Times’s Amy Harmon on what it means to be a science writer

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Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a “tour de force” by The New York Times and “a book that should be required reading at every medical school in the world…a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing” by The Wall Street Journal.

He is also the author of the 2006 bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals atThe New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2005, he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he blogs regularly at The Public Library of Science. For more information, visit his website or follow him on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

On Tuesday, I published the first of a three-part Q&A with Pulitzer Prize winning science reporter Amy Harmon of The New York Times’s. That conversation focused on “Navigating Love and Autism,” Harmon’s latest story from an ongoing series titled “Autism, Grown Up.”

Today’s entry looks at Harmon’s writing about autism as a way to address questions about what it means to be a science writer — and the amount of work that’s required behind the scenes to make sure that what ends up in print is responsible and reliable.

Background: Yesterday’s post on why Harmon’s story is so remarkable is here. These interviews are part of an ongoing project called #SciWriteLabs, which examines topics related to science writing and journalism. An introduction to the series can be found here; the rest of the entries are here. Amy’s mention of  The Panic Virus is a reference to my book about the controversies over autism and vaccines (out now in paperback), not this blog.

SM: Looking back at your career, it looks like your shift to focusing on science and technology occurred around the same time you began writing about autism (in 2004). Is that correct??

AH: I started writing about technology in the early-1990′s, in my first job out of college at the Los Angeles Times. I pretty much got the beat because I was using email to stay in touch with my college friends, and my editors, who were not familiar with this new “Internet” thing, thought that was super-cool. I was technically a business reporter, but I always felt like a bit of a fraud passing around my cards with that title because I wrote almost exclusively about the sociology of technology rather than the financial stuff.

My interest in autism/Asperger syndrome paralleled my entry to tech-writing in the sense that I had a personal interest in it, and you are right that my other science reporting spun off of that. (I got interested in all the implications of new consumer DNA tests after returning from maternity leave because I had been offered them when pregnant). But just like I felt I was masquerading as a business reporter I often feel like I don’t really have the right to call myself a science reporter, because I’m just writing about people through the prism of science.

SM: I find that fascinating: that you feel like you shouldn’t call yourself a science reporter because you’re writing about people through the prism of science (as opposed, I guess, to writing about neural pathways or synaptic misfires). I actually think that one of the things that makes your work so valuable is that it is so infused with science. Your work highlights how much background knowledge is needed to write about these issues responsibly.

Recently I was talking with some of my colleagues about the difference between a science writer and someone writing about a topic that happens to be related to science. I made the comparison to music writing: I started out my career as a rock critic. At the outset, I’d write features or do interviews with musicians, but I wasn’t really doing music writing because I didn’t have the experience or expertise to be able to talk intelligently and knowledgeably about the actual music. That took much more time and effort and work. (Another example: I recently wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about theGardnerMuseum inBoston; that doesn’t make me an art critic.) But you had to bring an enormous amount of scientific knowledge to these stories.

AH: Well, thanks – and you’re right, I shouldn’t underplay the amount of science reporting that goes into my stories, since it takes up an inordinate amount of my employer’s time. (Ed: Your time, too!) I also spend a fair amount of time feeling guilty for not giving credit in print to the scientists and other experts who help me ensure that the stories you so kindly termed “intimate” are also scientifically accurate. When you’re constructing a story using only scenes and dialogue, you can’t really quote experts: It breaks the flow.  I used to send apologetic emails before the story ran that made it sound like it had just not worked out for me to use their quote. Now I’ve taken to telling expert-y people up front, “Look, I’m not going to quote you. But I hope this will help average readers understand this topic you care about and would really appreciate your help.”

With this latest series of stories on autism, I was hugely fortunate that people like Dr. Catherine Lord, the director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and one of the true authorities in the field, continued taking my calls through the whole process. Cathy and I spoke on the phone on at least five separate occasions and exchanged a dozen emails. She also read drafts of paragraphs that I was concerned about. (I checked with her, for example, about whether Jack and Kirsten’s sensory issues reflected what is typical among people on the autism spectrum; about what is known of the biological basis for autism among people who have normal intelligence and language development like they do; and about whether she thinks it is true, as suggested in the story, that girls are under-diagnosed.)

What I meant about not being a “real” science reporter is that, unlike others I admire, I do not have a particular talent for translating the news scientists report in journals or at conferences into terms that make sense to the general public. So instead I try to discern the impact of science on people’s lives, and write about THAT. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to understand the science – I do – but at least I don’t have to explain it in so many words.

SM: Just yesterday, I was teaching a seminar to scientists here at M.I.T.about how to write for a popular audience. I was trying to lay out the differences between writing for a newspaper/magazine and writing for an academic journal. In an average paragraph in an academic journal, there might be five or six footnoted references indicating why the author(s) feels confident making those statements. I explained that in a more journalistic account, those footnotes aren’t there — but that the writer still needs to have that information at his or her fingertips.

AH: Yes, exactly. I often wish for footnotes. And not only for the science. I think the question “how does she know that?’’ can arise in the reader’s mind when I report on a scene where I obviously wasn’t present. I wish there was another layer of the story, somehow, where I could say, “Conducted separate interviews with everyone in the room to corroborate what was said and done in this graf,’’ or “I have the text of an email so-and-so sent spelling out the thoughts I am ascribing to him here,’’ etc.

SM: Moving on to a subject near and dear to my heart: You mentioned that at various points while you were working on this series, editors/colleagues asked about including a section on the vaccine controversy. Your reply (and I’m obviously paraphrasing here) was, ‘No, that’s been covered and it’s time to move on.’

AH: I cannot tell you how many times I silently thanked you for The Panic Virus and its definitive rebuttal of the idea that vaccines cause autism. And I mean that in a purely journalistic sense, aside from being a mother of a seven-year-old who and a member of society who wants kids to get vaccinated to avoid preventable illness and death.

By the time I began work on this, I felt like the science of the vaccine controversy had been so thoroughly put to rest by you and other great reporters (including Amy Wallace in Wired and Michael Specter in The New Yorker), that I could focus on what I was most interested in — the challenges autism poses for this generation of young adults (and for the rest of us) — rather than on its causes.

That said, I was making the case that this group is newsworthy in part because of its size, so I could not sidestep the question of why the diagnosis of autism has climbed so sharply since the 1980’s. This is where the reporting you’re talking about comes in – for what ended up as three sentences in the first story, I read at least a dozen journal articles, talked to the Centers for Disease control, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and several other epidemiologists, sociologists, psychiatrists and educators, including Dr. Eric Fombonne, a professor at McGill University who is one of the pre-eminent autism epidemiologists in the world, and Dr. Fred Volkmar, the chair of the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. I didn’t exactly mean for that research to be limited to three sentences. I wrote many long paragraphs, and edited them five different ways. But they all ended up bogging down the narrative, and at some point, after many hours of tinkering, I realized that I just didn’t need to spell it all out. I was confident enough – because of all that reporting – to condense it. And I added what might seem like an excessive number of  hyperlinks to the online version of the story so that readers who wanted to could see that evidence for themselves:

And Justin’s parents were not alone. As the condition’s hallmark behaviors became better recognized, many children who were previously designated as mentally retarded or just dismissed as strange were being given an autism diagnosis, a trend that has continued. Some experts also believe that the actual number of people with autism has been climbing.

I knew most readers would not actually be clicking through to these and some other links to sources I put in, to show the effectiveness of therapies like applied behavior analysis, for instance. And when the story went up on-line, an editor who way outranks me wanted to remove them, because he worried they would distract from the new  “quick” links we were introducing in the article, which popped up with video clips of Justin and photos of his artwork. But I kind of put my foot down, because I thought they were important. And when I came across this blog entry by science writer Marianne English after the story ran, I felt vindicated that least ONE reader had noticed (watch for your shoutout):

When talking about therapies and options for the condition, [Harmon] hyperlinks to peer-reviewed research to back her claims. I imagine she went to these lengths to battle misinformation that vaccines cause autism or that special diets can help people living with it. Writer Seth Mnookin also puts many of these claims to rest in a recent book with similar evidence…

SM: I don’t think it’s accidental that it’s another reporter who noticed that; the amount of background reporting and research effort that’s needed to do a good job is something casual news consumers often don’t realize.

AH: True. And not only news consumers! I am hugely grateful to the Timesfor letting me spend months on a story, but I know my editors sometimes wonder what, exactly, is taking so long. Because ironically, if you do the background reporting well in stories like this – whether it’s science reporting or other types of material that enables you to get inside the heads of your characters – you can’t SEE it in the story. The background reporting is what gives you the authority to write it – you have to do it, but then you have to hide it, too. As I was thinking about how to answer your original question, I started re-reading the stories, remembering the interviews I did to back up each line. There are so many people whose profoundly influenced the story but don’t show up in the actual text, people like Dr. Gerald Fishbach of the Simons Foundation; Kevin Pelphrey at Yale’s Neuroscience Laboratory; Eric Courchesne, the director of the University of California, San Diego Autism Center of Excellence; and literally dozens more. I’m grateful to be able to give them some small acknowledgement here.

Widening the climate conversation

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Richard Betts is Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre and a visiting Professor at the Universityof Exeter.  He was a lead author on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with Working Group 1 (Physical Science Basis) responsible for the assessment of radiative forcing due to land cover change.  For the Fifth Assessment Report he is a lead author, assessing impacts on terrestrial ecosystems.  Richard was also a lead author on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.  He is a regular contributor to climate blogs such as https://bishophill.squarespace.com/ and https://judithcurry.com/ and can be found on Twitter as @richardabetts

Richard Feynman used to bemoan the fact that much of the communication of science was focussed on whether a particular discovery provided a cure for cancer.  An analogous situation seems to apply to communication of climate science – the message often seems to be about whether a new piece of work has shown anthropogenic climate change to be either a greater or lesser problem than previously thought, and hence whether cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are even more urgent or completely unnecessary.

But climate science is not a single-issue subject.  It is not carried out solely to see whether cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed or not.  A further and increasingly important issue is to understand the changes and variability we are seeing in order to help us live with the ever-changing weather and climate.  Also, of course, it is important simply to increase the sum total of human understanding simply as an end in itself.  Like art and music, gaining deeper insights into how the world around us actually works can enrich our lives and bring enjoyment.

Unfortunately, these other aspects of climate science are rarely seen outside of the scientific community, giving a skewed impression of the science.  Public discussion of the science mostly focuses on the implications for policy, and also increasingly on attacking or defending the integrity of the science rather than on its intellectual content.  A very large proportion of the commentary on climate science is not actually from working scientists, it is from others who have a political rather than scientific interest.  When scientists are involved, they are often discussing it within the usual policy context.  It seems that in an increasingly polarised debate on climate policy, science can get sucked in and used as a political football.

In any policy debate, opponents of a policy will naturally seek to question and challenge the evidence base underpinning the need for the policy.  They may perceive or claim the evidence to be unreliable or even biased.  Promoters of the policy will naturally be defensive of the evidence base.  This is all expected behaviour in the policy world.

The difficulty comes when those responsible for gathering the evidence feel under attack and respond in a defensive manner themselves.  If they perceive themselves as opponents of those challenging the evidence whilst being allies of those defending the evidence, and start behaving accordingly, this only reinforces the perception of bias from the opponents, and positive feedback sets in.  This appears to have happened with climate science in the context of mitigation policy.  The scientific aspects of the wider climate debate have become increasingly focussed on one end of the policy debate or the other.  It is much less common to see discussion of the implications of the science for other questions such as adaptation planning, and even rarer to see public discussion of climate science merely for intellectual interest.  Climate scientists have consequently become perceived as being part of the debate on a single policy issue, rather than as just scientists seeking to advance knowledge.

This leads to the risk of loss of trust in scientists as objective advisors.  If climate science communication remains focussed on a single policy issue then of course the science can be perceived or presented as being part of the policy and not merely informing it.  Despite repeated protestations that the science is objective, the constant framing of it within a narrow policy discussion does nothing to back this up.

What to do about this?  I think the only solution is to talk about the science as science, in the context of all its implications and also for its own academic interest – and talk about it to everyone irrespective of their position in the policy debate.  This includes talking with sceptics, and not in defensive mode but as scientists willing to talk around the issue.  It used to be the received wisdom that climate scientists should not engage with “sceptics” beause, it was said, it only wasted time and gave credibility to arguments that had already been countered many times before.  In my view this is no longer a helpful strategy, if it ever was.  Counter-arguments to criticism are given from a distance, but without direct engagement they may be ignored, and without a proper conversation it is often hard to get the real heart of the issue and address the real nature of the disagreement.  Also, while arguing from a distance may address some of the scientific issues, it is hard to clarify misconceptions of motivation.  If “sceptics” believe scientists to be motivated by political agendas or simply protecting their jobs, and scientists believe sceptics to be “anti-science” or promoted or even funded by vested interests, each side merely claiming otherwise is unlikely to make a difference.  Proper discussion is required if true motivations are to be understood.

Of course this needs to happen in a wide variety of communications arenas, but social media offers great opportunities for such engagement.  A large number of blogs cover climate change issues, but with one or two exceptions these cover scientific discussions with little direct engagement from critics, or feature discussions amongst groups of largely like-minded individuals who merely reinforce each others views. There are signs that this is starting to change, for example with some scientists engaging with sceptic blogs, and while discussions can often be robust they can be constructive if participants take care to remain civil.  Twitter, with its completely open and unmoderated format and easy facilities for tracking and searching topics, increasingly features discussions from across the traditional divide.  However, there is still room for much greater engagement outside of traditional interest groups.

Importantly, such discussions need to move on from being anchored in the usual one-dimensional policy debate.  Scientists need to be willing to discuss uncertainties, controversies and technical challenges (ie: the interesting bits!) rather than just feeling they need to defend themselves against attack.  Only by scientists being clearly seen to operate as scientists will trust be maintained – and this means being seen to explore the issues, challenge each other and not worry about how this will be seen or presented in the mitigation policy debate.

As Feyman said, ““Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”  Focussing only on the nearly sure may suit the policy debate but it doesn’t help advance the science or engage others in it.  Let’s talk about it all, with everybody.

SciWriteLabs 7.1: The New York Times’s Amy Harmon on neurodiversity and writing about autism

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Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a “tour de force” by The New York Times and “a book that should be required reading at every medical school in the world…a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing” by The Wall Street Journal.

He is also the author of the 2006 bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals atThe New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2005, he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he blogs regularly at The Public Library of Science. For more information, visit his website or follow him on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

On December 26, The New York Times featured the second installment in “Autism, Grown Up,” an ongoing series by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Amy Harmon. The 5,113-word, front-page story, titled “Navigating Love and Autism,” chronicled the courtship and romance of 21-year-old Jack Robison and 20-year-old Kirsten Lindsmith, both of whom have been diagnosed (and self-identify) as having Asperger syndrome.

Similar to Harmon’s first piece in this series, “Autistic and Seeking a Place in the World,” “Navigating Love and Autism” is an incredibly intimiate piece of journalism. It’s freckled with vignettes that wouldn’t feel out of place in short stories by Raymond Carver or Andre Dubus. But the intimacy and narrative flow shouldn’t obscure readers from the incredible effort that went into writing this piece – or the incredible amount of science reporting and research that allowed Harmon to be confident making the statements she made.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been running lightly edited transcripts of e-mail interviews between Harmon and me about her work, science writing and reporting, and the evolving media landscape on my blog at the Public Library of Science; because of the wide interest expressed by readers, they’re going to be reprinted here. (The first entry is below, the second piece will be posted on Friday, and the final installment will run next week.) Nature.com readers interested in further exploring the issues raised in these conversations can also check out SciWriteLabs, an ongoing feature I curate that addresses issues relevant to science journalism. Finally, David Dobbs interviewed Harmon a few months ago for a great piece in The Open Notebook, a site dedicated to “the story behind the best science stories.”

 

New York Times science reporter Amy Harmon

 

SM: I want to start by going back to some articles you wrote back in 2004 that touched, either directly or indirectly, on the neurodiversity movement. That was a fairly bold topic for the newspaper of record to be tackling. What made you write about it at that time?

AH: I was interested in Asperger syndrome in 2004 because I had an adult family member who I thought fit the description. That person was not interested in being diagnosed, but I figured others must be. The diagnosis itself had only entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a decade earlier, and was just beginning to be widely known.

At the time I was part of a new group of reporters assigned to write what we called “How We Live” stories, about trends in American life, so the idea fit my beat. And when I called around, and visited some support groups, I found that this was in fact happening on a fairly large scale: adults who had previously thought of themselves as fundamentally flawed because of their social oddness were finding some relief in tracing it to a neurological condition.

I never met the librarian I used in my lede to that first piece (“Finding Out: Adults and Autism; An Answer, but Not a Cure, for a Social Disorder,”4/29/04), I only spoke to him on the phone, but I will never forget how visceral his story felt, just listening to it – he wept, he told me, when he came across an article in an academic journal describing Asperger’s. Because he recognized himself.

There was a huge outpouring of response to that article, from people who saw themselves in it and people who thought they saw friends or family members. I heard from lot of people wondering “hey, am *I* on the spectrum? Is my spouse? My relative?’’ etc.  One of those people was the then-editor of the Week in Review, who urged me to do a follow-up piece. And I had wanted to address the eye-rolling that goes on about the Asperger’s diagnosis, which some people see as basically a medical excuse for bad behavior.

So I did a follow-up piece for the Review about a new term that I had not managed to work into the first story — “neurodiversity’’ – and the nascent movement calling for acceptance of all flavors of human oddity, which were increasingly being linked to variations in brain wiring.

That led to one more piece, about what was then a small but vocal group of people on the autism spectrum who were saying they did not want to be cured, that autism was part of who they were. I was fascinated by this polarization of the spectrum, with parents of the more severely affected and typically non-verbal doing everything they could to find a cure, and others, who could express themselves, saying they were part of a civil rights movement for tolerance of neurological differences.

Others have since written more about the neurodiversity movement – including David Wolman, in a memorable 2008 Wired piece, and more recently Steve Silberman, whose tweets and blog posts on the subject are thoughtful and unbelievably comprehensive (he is working on a book about it).

I might have written more then, but I had my daughter that year, and soon after I got back from maternity leave I started writing about new genetic technologies, which led to a series on a cancer clinical trial. When I finished that, at the end of 2010, I pretty much immediately returned to autism, and it was interesting to see how the landscape had changed.

SM: You noted that you were “fascinated by this polarization of the spectrum.” I’ve never covered a story that’s engendered as strong reactions as writing about autism. Did you hear from people who were upset by your stories — and if so, what types of reader responses did you get?

AH: After the 2004 story about people with autism saying “don’t cure us” ran, I got mail from parents whose children are more severely impaired who were really upset. And of course I could see that – what did these so-called autistic people mean, what did I mean, they shouldn’t try to cure their children? Children who were completely uncommunicative, who hurt themselves, whose lives seemed so horribly limited by this condition?

To have only a single term to refer to people with the vast range of autism’s manifestations strikes me as problematic. I see the importance of recognizing what are believed to be the common neurological roots of the different forms of impairment. I also see why “Asperger syndrome” has come to be considered by many experts too ill-defined to be meaningful. But there has got to be some more accurate and evocative way to describe the differences. It’s something I really struggled with in these recent stories. I don’t like “mild autism” because that seems to downplay the considerable challenges faced by people like Jack or Kirsten. And I tried to avoid the terms “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” because they are so vague–does verbal ability equate to function? Not necessarily. Are we just talking about IQ? But IQ is so hard to measure in individuals with autism. What about people who are hyper-articulate and score high on IQ tests but can’t hold a reciprocal conversation?

I heard from parents of more severely affected children after the “Navigating Love” story ran too, but these letters were a bit different. It’s not that they didn’t like the story. It was more that they feel the kind of autism they deal with every day has been marginalized. Because the vast majority of the growth in diagnosis comes from including people like Jack and Kirsten, they’ve kind of come to dominate in the popular image of what autism is. (I do hope to address that segment of the spectrum in a future story.)

I also heard from people on the spectrum who disliked various elements of the story, like the part where Jack and Kirsten contemplate treatments that might make it easier for them to gain insight into other people, including each other, because it implied that there was something wrong with them. (And, in the judgment of these readers, that is not the case.) Another person said the story implied that autistic people could only have romantic relationships with other autistic people. Of course it’s always difficult to try to illuminate the condition of a group of people by writing in-depth about one or two individuals, so I can see where all these complaints are coming from. But I did also hear from a lot of people on the spectrum who said the story gave them insight and a sense of hope. And maybe my favorite emails came from so-called “neurotypicals” — i.e., people who are NOT on the spectrum — who said they saw shades of their own relationship challenges in Jack and Kirsten’s. The main difference, one person said, is that “they are much more honest.”

 

Geology for Global Development

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This week’s guest blogger is Joel Gill, Director/Founder of Geology for Global Development. Joel has been studying geology since the age of 14 and collecting rocks since long before that. His enthusiasm for the subject led him to study for an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, specialising in Geological Sciences, and a postgraduate MSc in Engineering Geology at the University of Leeds.

As part of his study Joel undertook fieldwork across the UK, and overseas in Greece and Chile – applying his skills and knowledge to active seismic and volcanic regions, areas affected by modern and historic landslides, and areas with important economic geology. In addition to this Joel has also worked on water projects in East Africa (Tanzania and Uganda), overseeing evaluations of failed shallow wells and surveys for new wells. Since September 2011, Joel has been studying for a PhD within the Environmental Modelling and Monitoring Research Group, in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work hopes to reduce the impacts of natural disasters through developing multi-hazard models for small urban areas.

Across the world millions of people are living in severe poverty, without access to any of the basic needs that many of us take for granted – a clean water supply, a reliable food source, safe shelter and suitable infrastructure. This lack of basic needs can also mean communities are particularly vulnerable to devastating natural hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides. Geologists have a crucial role to play in supporting communities to overcome poverty. Their knowledge of subjects from hydrogeology, natural resources, engineering geology and geohazards mean they can make a significant contribution to global and sustainable development.

Though geoscientists possess many important and relevant skills, there are two major gaps which can hinder their engagement in the serious debates surrounding development. Firstly, there are very few cases where students are given the opportunity within their university education to think about issues related to development, such as vulnerability, sustainability, building technical capacity and communication to other cultures. These ‘soft-skills’ are fundamental to effective and long-lasting development. Secondly, there are very few opportunities to gain experience in the sector, working with NGOs in the UK or working overseas with universities, NGOs or governments, undertaking specific geo-related projects and building the technical capacity of local geologists, teachers and students.

Geology for Global Development (GfGD), established in 2011, is working to fill these gaps, with a particular focus on students and recent graduates. GfGD is working to inspire and engage young geologists from all backgrounds, supporting them to think about how they can apply their interdisciplinary knowledge and wide-ranging skills to generate solutions and resources which support NGOs, empower communities and help lift people out of poverty.

Through the establishment of GfGD University Groups, run and developed by student ambassadors, we are starting to outwork our vision and grow our membership. These groups give students of the geosciences and related subjects an opportunity to pursue and outwork their interest in development, through seminars, discussion groups, advocacy, fundraising, writing for our blog and getting involved in our national work. Our national work currently involves an advocacy programme, writing resources to support NGOs requiring some geological support, developing resources to support members thinking about relevant MSc courses and placements, and fundraising. We have exciting plans for the future which include fieldwork grants, supporting capacity-building work in developing countries, a GfGD conference for our members, and UK/Overseas placements to give members on the ground experience and skill development.

As Director of GfGD, I am tremendously excited by the enthusiastic response from geologists, and their willingness of those beginning their careers to use their skills to benefit society, fight poverty and improve the lives of many people for the better.

Local Tanzanian water engineer, working with the local community, to survey for water in Tanzania © Geology for Global Development 2011

When I visited Tanzania I saw the impacts on communities that are forced to walk several kilometres for a glass of clean water. I saw the impacts on communities whose hopes were raised as a well was dug – only to find it stopped working soon afterwards because of a lack of good geoscience knowledge and poor community engagement. I also saw the joy that a sustainable water supply brought, built with a thorough understanding of the local groundwater conditions and appropriate community involvement.

Through inspiring and engaging students in the UK with a deeper understanding of the applications of their work to fighting poverty, it is this latter scenario that we believe we can see replicated and become the norm. It is our long term aim to develop a generation of geologists recognised across many sectors for their role in improving the lives of communities across the world.

Young children in Tanzania, appreciating their newly repaired water supply © Geology for Global Development 2011

If you would like more information about Geology for Global Development, then please do get in touch through our website – www.gfgd.org – and you can also find us on Facebook. 

Climate change and extreme events

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Dr Andy Russell is a climate science lecturer in the Institute for the Environment at Brunel University. His research focuses on how severe storms develop in Europe and Antarctic climate dynamics. He blogs his thoughts on weather and climate issues and tweets as @dr_andy_russell.

Despite the recent controversies regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international effort to summarise the state of the climate and make projections about its likely condition by the end of the 21st Century rumbles on.

As I type, I have a massive chapter for the next full Assessment Report (due to be published in 2014) sitting on my desk to review and a couple of analysis routines churning their way through terabytes of climate model data. There’ll be hundreds of other people around the world focussed on similar things. The aim is to produce the 5th series of Assessment Reports since the IPCC was formed in 1988 to help decision makers, well, make decisions.

But the IPCC has been up to other things recently as well. In November 2011 it published a Special Report Summary for Policymakers on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (or SREX, the full report will be published in February 2012). Understanding how extreme events might change in the future is really important as it’s these things that will really impact people: heat waves, flash floods, hurricanes, droughts and sea level rise related inundation. This is far more useful to know than the quite abstract concept of global mean temperature change. This report looks like an advance in the IPCC procedure as it involved a far more integrated approach than usual IPCC outputs, having authors from climate science, impacts and adaptation backgrounds as well as disaster risk management experts.

Although it sounds obvious, one of the key conclusions of SREX was that the impact of extreme climatic events is greatest where vulnerability is highest. On the ground, this has manifested itself as higher fatality levels in developing nations and higher economic losses in developed countries. There’s a lot to think about here in terms of how developing nations move forward and how developed nations approach things sustainably to reduce exposure. That’s not really my area though.

From a scientific point of view, they also point out that analysing extremes is relatively difficult as they are rare and data from around the world are not always up to the job. That said, this depends a lot on the particular “extreme” being investigated – this has always struck me as slightly odd about the climate extremes community in that the only common theme is the statistics and not the science behind the phenomena.

Looking to projections, the IPCC SREX assign their highest confidence assessment (“virtually certain”) to increases in temperature extremes by 2100. This is because this is pretty much a direct response to the radiation changes forced by atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions. Everything else is a slightly more messy consequence of the temperature changes and these other fields vary much more amongst the 12 different models used in this analysis making their projections uncertain. However, it also looks likely that heavy precipitation events will increase in certain regions and that the maximum winds associated with tropical cyclones will increase whilst their total number will likely decrease.

Oddly enough, the emissions pathway that we take in the future (the IPCC analyses different sets of projections based on different socioeconomic and technological development assumptions) has little impact on extreme events in the next 30 years or so – they don’t appear to have an impact until the latter half of the 21st Century when inter-model variability masks most of the climate signal anyway. This highlights how making projections of extreme events is a difficult game. In that spirit, here are two of the key problems as I see them relating to my area of research on severe storms in Europe:

Loading the dice or getting new dice?

If we assume that climatic quantities have a normal distribution (which isn’t always the case, especially with precipitation) then you can view the extremes as the tails at either end of the distribution e.g. hot or cold. So climate change could be viewed as like loading dice – you start rolling more sixes (or getting more hot days). However, when the climate regime changes this analogy breaks down as, instead of just rolling more sixes, you start needing to roll sevens as climate records are broken (see the figure below). This poses a problem for climate models as, like a six sided die isn’t designed to roll a seven, climate models haven’t been designed (or at least haven’t been verified against) conditions that have never been observed.

We’re gonna need a smaller box.

The second problem is that some important things – like severe storms, tornados and regional and local changes such as river catchment area precipitation changes – are too small for climate models to represent or resolve. The reason for this is that these computer models split the atmosphere (and oceans) into a 3D array of boxes. The important equations are solved in each box and then they pass information to neighbouring boxes as appropriate at each model time step. These boxes usually have horizontal dimensions of around 100-400 km to allow for a convenient computational time. However, storms and tornados work on scales of significantly less than 100 km so there’s no way that the models can tell us anything about these things. This problem is particularly acute in relation to the IPCC SREX as this analysis used a suite of climate model data from a project called CMIP3, which was completed in 2006 for the last IPCC assessment and, therefore, does not use the most up-to-date and highest resolution model data. (The data currently being prepared for the next IPCC Assessment Report called CMIP5 is, however, not yet complete so perhaps this criticism is a bit unfair.)

Is this good enough?

So does this mean that analyses using these model data are not useful or reliable? When faced with this question I struggle to get past the fact that, however much they can improve in the future, these models are still the best and only tool we have for making climate projections. Beyond that, we can take comfort in the fact that the very basic physics of climate science is really well understood – even very simple energy balance models can tell us useful things about the effects of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas changes. What we’re talking about here are the details, albeit very important details, and in that respect our current analyses are consistent with the things that we’re pretty sure of.

The green curve represents the distribution of Swiss summer temperatures from 1864 to 2002. Clearly, 2003 does not align well with that distribution and is an example of an extreme breaking a previous record. This figure has been taken from the IPCC AR4, for more details see here.