Today the world, tomorrow New York

When is a World Science Festival not a world science festival? When it is, in reality, the New York Science Festival. So, treat with caution the announcement: World Science Festival: A Universe of Science in New York City, May 28 - June 1, 2008.

It turns out to be the science festival equivalent of the World Series, which is, of course, nothing of the sort, just an obscure ball game run in a country that has had its day.

The World Science Festival "will take place from May 28th through June 1st, 2008 at 15 venues throughout New York City, many in the Washington Square Area of Greenwich Village". Nothing wrong with that. But you will struggle hard to find anything in the proposed programme that yells out "world".

If I lived in San Francisco, or even Boston, north American cities with genuine scientific stature, I would be a bit miffed. Don't even talk about London, Oxford or Cambridge, to pick a few nearer to home.

Science journalism through a telescope

For many years, the excellent Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has spasmodically picked over the entrails of journalism . Science journalism has featured in its pages many a time. this aspect now has a blog, The Observatory, in which Curtis Brainard sets out to "to critique the coverage of science and the environment".

The "manifesto" for this new slot tells us that "The science desks at our nation’s newspapers are shrinking or disappearing, just as the number of foreign bureaus and correspondents, investigative teams, and other costly (and thus “expendable”) facets of the journalistic enterprise have been shrinking to bolster profit margins." In their place we have "a vast array of Web sites and blogs [that have] emerged in recent years to crank out a daily torrent of scientific, environmental, and medical news and information".

Some would argue with the assertion that "To a certain extent, these new gateways are making up for the loss of traditional platforms for science news." As Dave Tebbutt, a writer on IT rather than science has said in his own blog, much of blogdom is "ego-driven dross". Science blogs are not immune to this all too accurate observation.

The propensity of bloggers to drivel, and Brainard's spot on view of the decline of mainstream science journalism, reinforce the need for something like The Observatory. In his note launching the slot, Brainard says that:

"The Observatory will monitor science journalism - covering the coverage - with an eye toward improving the journalism and thereby improving the discourse. It will be a guide to the best and worst of science and environmental journalism; it will tell you where the press excels and makes bold innovations. And it will point out where it falls victim to spin, engages in alarmism, perpetrates false balance, misrepresents the science in peer-reviewed literature, or displays questionable priorities in news judgment."

You have to admire anyone who sets out with such high ambitions as "improving the journalism". To achieve this, if blogs really are taking over from journalism, let us hope that Brainard finds time to criticise them with the same rigour.

It might be nice if CJR also looked beyond the USA. They may have turned science journalism into a recognised profession, and something that you can actually study at degree level, but their style of journalism is not the same as that practised elsewhere on the planet. That's not a value judgement, just a fact of life.

While science journalists in other countries cannot fail to observe, and perhaps learn from, what goes on in the USA,
the insularity of the locals there suggests that this is unlikely to be a two-way process. Perhaps the CJR can bring this home to the locals from time to time.

Writing across the disciplines

Science, the journal, walks a narrow line between accessibility and scientific rigour. Up front the articles are for all and sundry, well anyone with a smattering of, and an interest in, science. At the back of the paper it is heavy science.

The result of this balancing act, which Nature also manages, is that many readers can't penetrate much of the back half. The editors are well aware of this, which is why Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science, has tackled the subject in an editorial Approaching Science (vol. 318, issue 5851, p 715). He also introduced a new experiment and invited readers to respond.

Kennedy sums up the issue as follows "The language used in Reports and Research Articles is sufficiently technical and arcane that they are hard to understand, even for those in related disciplines." No one would disagree with his assertion that "accessibility is a problem". And it is getting worse, as subjects become ever more arcane. "Each specialty has focused in to a point at which even the occupants of neighboring fields have trouble understanding each others' papers."

The experiment? "Each Research Article published this week and in the next five issues will be preceded by a one-page 'Authors' Summary': an account, with one figure, of what the paper reports and what its conclusions are."

The approach that Science is taking matches the way I used to describe the approach that New Scientist took to its editing. Unashamedly written for scientists, but not so much so that a seriously interested "outside" would stumble, the line was that the physics, to pick a discipline at random, was there for geneticists, for example, and vice versa.

Kennedy takes a similar tack in describing Science's experiment. "Our plan is for summaries of papers in physical science fields to be reviewed by our life-sciences editors and vice versa."

The objective is laudable,m if ambitious. "The one-page summary is intended to make clear what the investigators did, how it was done, what the result was, and its significance."

It would be wonderful if every scientific journal went down the same road. But there just aren't enough literate scientists out there. Nor enough science journalists and editors to help them with the task.

Anyone interested in this experiment can catch up on the papers that have received this treatment over on the relevant bit of the Science web site.

Let's hope it catches on. In these web enhanced days, it would be a great add on for the electronic versions of journals. No need to soil paper with the summaries. They could even make them freely available to people who do not subscribe to their journals. But that may be a step too far for the money machine that is scientific publishing.

Twisted DNA experts

James Watson firmly planted his foot into his mouth recently, with his comments about race and intelligence. This should, though, surprise no one. It certainly would not surprise Clive Cookson, who recently reviewed Watson's latest book in the Financial Times.

In his review, Gene genies, Cookson writes "There is something almost otherworldly about Watson, as if he does not know what effect he is having on people." Having sat through a rambling and provocative talk by Watson, I can only agree. The man may have won a Nobel Prize, but he is also a loose cannon.

The publicity will have done nothing to harm sales of Watson's book, but perhaps the biggest beneficiary will be Craig Venter and his own book. All of a sudden, this "renegade scientist" looks like a good guy.

By a coincidence that almost smacks of collusion between the publishers, Venter and Watson were both in the UK with their new books to promote. (Cookson reviews both books.) It was Watson's own book tour that blew up in his face, leaving Venter to hog the airways.

The FT isn't the only newspaper to commission joint of the two books. The Guardian also commissioned an omnibus review, Learning the lessons of life, this time from Georgina Ferry. The Guardian tells us that Ferry is "the author of Max Perutz and the Secret of Life" – a good read, by the way – but it fails to mention the book she wrote in collaboration with Sir John Sulston, who also collected a Nobel prize for his work on gene sequencing, a subject that is central to the work of both Venter and Watson.

Ferry and Sulston collaborated on "The Common Thread" an excellent account of the race to sequence the human genome. This described how Sulston and Venter were at daggers drawn, with the former horrified by the latter's commercial approach to the scientific challenge. Given her closeness to the story, it is perhaps not surprising that Ferry is not quite as gushing as Cookson about Venter's role in the story.

He advised Mrs Thatcher so he must be right

You have to be desperate to quote a clapped out advisor to Mrs Thatcher in support of your argument. When that person, Lord Monckton, is also a hereditary peer, and a retired journalist and "inventor" to boot, that desperation becomes terminal. But that is just what they do over at the grandly named Science and Public Policy Institute, SPPI, which has just published Papers by British Peer Disprove Catastrophic Human-Induced Global Warming and "Consensus".

Plenty of people have weighed in to dismember the peer's ideas. The puzzling bit for me is that an organisation should feel that advising Mrs Thatcher and being a "Lord" adds weight to their views. Both could equally be signs of eccentricity, or something even more deranged.

The idea that such a person can "disprove" all the stuff we read about climate change must also raise doubts about the credibility of SPPI. It seems that anyone can throw a bunch of grand words into its title and some people out there will take it seriously.

The problem with this set of initials, well, one of the problems, is that its title is awfully similar to a once credible outfit, the Scientists' Institute for Public Information. SIPI was in on the public engagement game, and in "educating" the media, long before the current bandwagon hit the road.