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There was a time when every newspaper story about science began, ‘ŮÉúСÊÓƵs
working in XXX have made a major breakthrough . . . ‘ Now I can pepper my
scripts with Chemists/Biologists/Physicists, as required, together with
a whole range of ‘new’ scientific one-liners such as: ‘Astronomers have
solved one of the riddles of the Universe . . . ‘ or ‘Medical researchers
believe they have located the gene that is responsible for . . . ‘

A few years ago, we journalists prided ourselves on our ability to spot
a good story and then to coax the zap-factor from the unwilling boffin.
But the public no longer wants to imagine old men in white coats with silver-rimmed
spectacles. They have seen scientists on TV who were sitting beside whizzing
computer screens, not laboratory test tubes. This is an era when walls and
barriers are falling. So too is the barrier between scientists and the public.
What has caused the change? Certainly it has much to do with grants and
money – but that is not all.

A key factor has been the lack of a bit of gas in a very remote corner
of the world. The environment is a science with a difference. Its ‘input
variables’ are the actions of the public. As Jeremy Baldwin, chief press
officer for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), explains: ‘Somehow
we had to persuade people to connect the aerosols they spray under their
armpits with a depletion of ozone over the Antarctic.’

Instead of fighting off media slang, they decided to learn to speak
it. The rules are simple: you take any scientific concept and you play ‘catch
phrase’ with it. For example, ‘in vitro fertilisation’ becomes ‘test-tube
baby’. Headlines are made of picture-words: give me pen and paper and I
can draw a baby in a test tube. I would be hard pushed to draw a fert in
a vitro.

Baldwin claims that it all began when the media turned ‘acid precipitation’
into ‘acid rain’. At first the NERC resented the switch because it felt
that ‘rain’ was misleading. But gradually it admitted at least that the
image was selling.

‘The greenhouse effect’ conjures up a wonderful image of somewhere hot
and stuffy. Even better, from the scientist’s point of view it is vaguely
accurate, even if few people understand how a greenhouse works.

The environmentalist’s greed for media space was only matched by the
media’s greed for news about the environment. It was at this point that
the connection between publicity and funding was made. Grants come most
easily to the projects that the public cares most about. The rest of science
had some catching-up to do.

It was hard for the more established sciences to adapt to media speak.
Take engineers. They invented their labels along with their inventions,
in the same methodical manner. ‘We want a device that emits light and we
will use a diode. What shall we call it? I know – a light emitting diode!’

The label is clumsy once the gadget becomes familiar and is quickly
whittled down to a meaningless acronym, in this case LED. Medics tend to
name new viruses and diseases after the person who identifies them. Often
this means a name that is difficult to pronounce and impossible to spell.

Until recently the only scientists with the.jpgt of words were the physicists.
They could pick words from every room of the house including the pantry.
Thus we have, ‘The Universe began with a big bang, tossed a quick pancake,
tasted like hot soup and ran over Schrodinger’s cat.’ The media were intrigued,
but now we know that the more enticing the name the more obscure the theory.

There are ways out. An acronym can be twisted into a real word. Obscure
theories can be linked to one of the great ongoing scientific sagas. For
example, anything to do with finding dark matter is ‘good news’. Almost
any advance on the subject will sell. Why? Because there is now a good summary
of the background that only takes a couple of paragraphs, and, after so
many stories on it, reporters think it matters. So it is ‘Physics and the
beginning of the Universe . . . ‘, ‘Chemists and buckyballs . . . ‘, and
‘Medics and HIV . . . ‘

Where do we go from here? Will chemists start appearing on programmes
like Blind Date to popularise their image? Will computer hacks write software
to search for catchy acronyms? And the biggest threat for me, will journalists
lose their jobs to media-friendly scientists and space-hungry press officers?

Berry-Anne Billingsley is a producer/presenter for the BBC World Service
Science Unit.