Suzanne Clancy CLANCY PHOTO: PHOTO BY MARC LIEBERMAN

REGIONAL GROUPS

by Suzanne Clancy

New England Science Writers Association

On June 25, the New England Science Writers and the Harvard School of Public Health held a workshop on relations between the media and public agencies in an era of bioterrorism threats and disease outbreaks. The school hosted the session, with a panel of representatives from the HSPH, the CDC, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Issues ranged from public opinion surveys on attitudes about bioterrorism responses to questions about the CDC’s handling of the anthrax episode and, more recently, the SARS epidemic.

On a warm and rainless summer evening in August, NESW members mingled at a harborside restaurant and bar in what is becoming a traditional late-summer social event.

DC Science Writers Association

In July, DCSWANs stepped out of the DC heat and into the cool interior of the Smithsonian Institution to learn about science and science reporting in Antarctica. Smithsonian researcher Linda Welzenbach talked about skidooing across ice fields looking for meteorites. Meteorites arrive on their own from interplanetary space, but a few are debris splashed back from big meteor impacts on the moon and (most rarely) Mars.

Peter West of the National Science Foundation talked about what it would take for a reporter to visit the bottom of the world: an editor with a budget and the ability to pass a rigorous physical.

National Public Radio’s Richard Harris told of his trip to Antarctica a few years ago. If patience really is a virtue, Harris became quite virtuous thanks to waiting for days in New Zealand for weather to clear and permit a flight southward in a military cargo plane. A knack for flexibility came in handy when land expeditions were scratched but new opportunities arose to fly to the South Pole.

At a July 11 conference on “conflicted science,” sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, researchers and journalists squared off on the question of how much space the media should give to reporting potential conflicts of interest among the researchers they cover. Nearly two-thirds of people recently polled by CSPI say that reporters should include information on whether university scientists quoted in their articles receive money from companies with a financial stake in the research.

Many of the researchers in the audience felt that journalists don’t do enough to point out conflicts of interest, but panelist Cornelia Dean of the New York Times said that reporters do their best to include such information when it appears relevant to the story. She and the other journalists on the panel warned that rigid policies to include disclosures in every article could take away valuable column inches from the newsworthy elements of a story.

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Suzanne Clancy is a science writer with The Burnham Institute in La Jolla, CA. Send information about regional meetings and events to sclancy@burnham.org.