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Science Writing: Reporting on the Front Lines

by Julie Ann Miller

‘Science for the People’ Vol. 18, No. 4 July-August 1986, p. 11 — 12

Julie Ann Miller is a science writer for Science News, and holds a doctorate in neuroscience.

I think that we need to look at science journalism as a type of journalism, rather than a subfield of science. I feel really uncomfortable when I hear people talking about science writing having a special purpose beyond that of other parts of the news–beyond informing people about what scientists are doing and why it might be relevant to them. 

On the one hand, you have scientists who are proprietary about science journalism, thinking that maybe they will become writers when they retire. On the other hand, you have people who see science writers as wise evaluators of science. That would be very nice, but I write three or four stories a week and there is no way I can do a thesis-style evaluation of everything that I write. 

So hopefully, you are just alerting people to what’s going on, and getting scientists in touch with each other. But some people are going to misinterpret what you say. I wrote an article about a fairly esoteric genetic work that had some implications for cancer research, and this work happened to be done in yeast. I got a letter from someone saying, “I knew yeast causes cancer. I am never eating bread again.” But I don’t think that was a reason not to write about it. 

I think we have a responsibility to try to point out the different implications of new research, rather than not writing about them. With the topic of PMS, some people interpreted it as another sign that women are all a little bit crazy. Other people interpreted it as finally taking seriously these symptoms that some women have. Up to that point, some doctors thought that women were just complainers, always talking about feeling bad before their periods. Now maybe the medical profession will address PMS more seriously. 

It’s the same sort of thing with brain differences. Some people will look at brain differences and say, “Well, this proves that men are smarter than women.” But if there really are differences in the male and female brain, I want my brain surgeon to know about them. So I think these issues can have medical implications, and are worth writing about and bringing up in as responsible a way as possible. You don’t want to ignore the topic just because it has certain political implications. 

One way to do this when you are talking to people is to ask questions that reveal social bias. I was really struck by one of the articles in the conference materials packet from Discover about a disorder in the Dominican Republic, where children appeared to be girls and then at age 12 suddenly turned out to be boys. This article quotes the researcher as saying that they were able to make this adjustment easily because they had a male brain hidden in a girl’s body. 

I thought there was more than that, and I looked up an article I had written about this story in 1980, when it first came out. In my article, I quoted the same researcher as saying that the seemingly easy acceptance of the sex change must be viewed in the perspective of the Dominican society, where there is clearly an advantage to being male. The men had all the good things, and the women stayed home. For somebody to find out at age 12 that they’re not in the bottom class but in the top class–that was a relatively easy adjustment to make. 

There aren’t any examples that I know of going the other way. But I think that it would be a lot harder if someone had been raised as a boy to suddenly hear, “Oh no, you have to stay home and cook and sew now.” Well, I guess it was just a year later, and the researcher had forgotten or stopped talking about that. Or maybe the science writer hadn’t asked that question. 

As for scientists, what they can do is to try and keep science writers informed. If there is a particular issue you’re really concerned with, you can write to a science reporter and suggest people they can talk to. 

Recently, I’ve been very impressed with Jeremy Rifkin. Whatever you think about his approach to biotechnology, he certainly knows how to put out a press release. And he includes the names and telephone numbers of not only the people who support him, but the people who oppose him. This really guarantees that he will get stories written. Sometimes you get a story, and if the scientist doesn’t volunteer information about who might be on the other side, it can take you a week to track someone down. So sometimes the story gets written without having the other side in it at all. 

The editors play a role in the sort of bias that gets into science writing. That causes writers to overblow stories, to make them longer, and to try to get better placement. Editors also have a role in the assignment of articles, and they tend to assign somebody to a story who supports their own political view. And if someone else on the staff wants to write about a certain topic, they will subtly or overtly discourage them. 

Also, the people writing about a certain field tend to be the ones impressed with the work going on in that area. I have often had nightmares about being a psychology writer on our staff, because I have a lot of problems with a lot of the work we write about. If it were my job to choose the stories, there wouldn’t be very many. But this also makes for a certain bias in reporting. 

It’s nice to think ideally what we would do to cover a story. But you are under the pressure of deadlines and changing topics all the time. You also want to say to scientists, “Every time you do a research project, you should do this, this, and this.” But I really have doubts that a lot of scientists would come to a conference like this to hear journalists tell them what they are doing wrong in their research.

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