Cornelia Dean - Making Sense of Science

For thirty years I have been a science journalist at the New York Times; for almost seven years, I headed the newspapers Science Department, supervising coverage of science, medicine, health, environment, and technical issues. From Day One, I have thought that covering these subjects for the Times was the best job in the world.

As science editor I dispatched correspondents to cover research in every continent. And I traveled myself, to places like the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where researchers study what may be Earths simplest food web, and Palomar Mountain, in California, where the 200-inch Hale Telescope gathers up the light of the universe.

We had the intellectual support of the editorial hierarchy in a newsroom that in those days was flush with money. For example, I once took it upon myself to dispatch a reporter to the Chilean Andes when astronomers there observed a newborn supernova. Coming from a newspaper where long-distance telephone calls were subjects of budgetary debate, I found this kind of thing thrilling.

Today, the money situation is not so good. The business model of the mainstream legacy news media is broken, and we do not know what will fix it. Though there are bright spotslike the Times, where support for science coverage is still strongnews outlets generally are cutting back on science and environmental reports. Across the country reporters on science and environment beats have been reassigned or fired outright. Medical coverage too often focuses on news you can use clickbait rather than advances in understanding human biology.

Internet sites take up some of the slack. But while the web can be a valuable source of information, it propagates bad information and even deliberately fake news along with the good. And the toxic quality of many comment threads online can actually turn people away from high-quality science news. At least, thats what researchers from the University of Wisconsin found in 2013. The finding was one of the reasons the magazine Popular Science ended the practice of allowing readers to comment online on its articles, as its online content director noted on September 24, 2013.

So while I continue to write for the Times, I have been spending more and more of my time talking to scientists and engineers about the need for them to communicate with the public. I teach seminars for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to help them develop the skills they need to conduct that kind of engagement successfully. I participate in training programs for young researchers seeking to engage more fully in the debates of the day. This engagement, I tell them, is (or should be) part of what it means to be a researcher.

In 2009 I distilled some of this thinking into a book, Am I Making Myself Clear?, aimed at encouraging researchers in these efforts. The book you are reading now is aimed at the other important part of the equation: the public, citizens, usthe people who struggle to make sense of what we hear when scientists and engineers talk to us andespeciallywhen others try to shape or spin those messages to their own advantage.

Of course, this book is written by a journalist, not a researcher. Even worse, it is the book of one journalistmeand I have no scientific or other technical training of any kind. I was first transferred into the Timess science department, on what was supposed to have been a temporary assignment, because someone (true story) had seen me in the newsroom carrying a copy of Scientific American.

So my goals are relatively modest. I hope to show my readers the kinds of thinking we do in the newsroom when we try to decide whether a given finding is newsworthy, trustworthy, and important. I will illustrate the book with examples from my experiences as a science journalist. Inevitably, I will leave things out or, I fear, ascribe undue importance to things just because I experienced them. Still, I hope the material I have collected here will help people assess the scientific and technical claims and counterclaims they increasingly encounter in public debates and in their private lives.

will talk about what happens when things in this world go wrong, either because researchers have misbehaved or because they find themselves in unfamiliar arenas, in courtrooms or quoted in the media.

The second part of the book will will discuss the influence of politics on the conduct of science, particularly when it comes to the environment and arguments over religion.

The Appendix offers nuts-and-bolts advice on assessing who is an expert, reading research papers, and deciding whether to believe polls and surveys.

This book cannot possibly be a comprehensive guide. It will not provide all the answers, or even many answers. It will, however, provide some interesting and (I hope) useful questions.