| Science sidelined in the government-PR-media frenzy | Alexander Holmes and Jonathan Mendel The Science: So What? campaign is a classic example of how bad science is ignored when agencies are only interested in audience impactUnder the previous government, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) ran a campaign called Science: So What? So Everything (SSW). It was designed to encourage young people via websites, media reports and special events, to be inspired by the contributions of science to their lives.The SSW campaign was not without problems. The project included a website that was expensive and inefficient and got little traffic for a campaign of this type. And then there were serious concerns about the quality of some of the research that BIS was promoting. In particular, a report on future jobs in science by the Fast Future consultancy was heavily promoted during the campaign despite failing to meet some basic standards.Both the department and its SSW campaign have come under fire from researchers in public and in private. We were interested in how BIS responded internally to these criticisms, which sought to improve their activities. So we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out.Good quality research depends upon robust, critical appraisal. As BIS is a major player in the UK's research work – and as the SSW campaign was intended to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics – we hoped the department would reflect the standards that contribute to the UK's reputation for excellent research. We hoped, for example, that since the department plays a role in assessing the quality of research in UK universities the studies it commissioned itself would be robust. Our findings are not encouraging. They suggest BIS did not respond appropriately to concerns about the SSW campaign and that their way of measuring success was questionable.The report on future jobs in science was commissioned and promoted as part of the SSW campaign by BIS, under the former business secretary, Lord Mandelson . The report was garlanded with supportive statements from the former science minister, Lord Drayson, and even the former prime minister, Gordon Brown.As soon as the report was released, major concerns were raised by bloggers and academics about such things as the methodology, the inappropriate use of Wikipedia and implausible claims about nanotechnology. These serious issues were largely missed by the mainstream media, beyond a blog on the Guardian's science website and an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement that criticised the report.The Conservative party – then in opposition – failed to challenge the report effectively. It even issued a press release that added further errors. For example, it argued that a worldwide survey used for the report "determined that 'Virtual Lawyer' is the fantasy job which people in Africa, Peru and Pakistan think is 'likely to be the best paid'." But as the Fast Future report makes clear, this was based on responses from only one person in Peru and one in Pakistan. It would be rather tenuous to assume their compatriots share their views. It is unfortunate that the Conservative party's criticisms of such a flawed document were themselves so ill conceived. More worryingly, the press release went out with David Willetts's name in the headline along with a lengthy quote. Willetts is now minister for universities and science.When BIS evaluated the success of the future jobs report, it used media coverage as a gauge and all but dismissed any criticisms. Our FOIA request shows that the PR agency Kindred (which worked for BIS on the project) noted that the report achieved "178 pieces of coverage across national, regional, consumer and online media … A combined OTS [opportunities to see] of 60,985,597 … An AEV [Advertising Equivalent Value] of £2,248,866". This is a poor measure of success in science communication. Public understanding of and engagement with science cannot usefully be measured by column inches in the press, without also considering the accuracy and efficacy of the project in question.There were also crude attempts to assess the online impact of coverage of the Future Jobs report. Kindred said the story "generated a seven-fold increase in volume of traffic to the campaign website". The increase raised the traffic to "7,733 website hits during the six days after the launch of the activity (compared to 1,167 website hits for the same period before the activity launch)". For a campaign aimed at millions of young people and backed by a £1m-plus budget, this trumpeted increase is pathetic.In dealing with criticisms, BIS and Kindred focused on managing negative publicity rather than on correcting mistakes or meaningful engagement with critics. For example, when the nanotechnology blogger James Hayton criticised the Fast Future report, an email exchange supplied in response to our FOIA request argued that "James' blog isn't particularly well known … Not that this means his criticisms aren't well-founded, but I doubt appeasement will be a worthwhile strategy". The emails are so heavily redacted it is impossible to know whether the comment was from a civil servant or a BIS contractor. In deciding whether to respond to Hayton's blog, these email exchanges gave considerably more attention to whether Hayton's criticisms would appear on the Guardian's science blog and how to distance BIS from any criticism than was given to the accuracy and significance of his points: "Given the reach of the Guardian blog, we believe that it is a worthwhile exercise for Rohit [Talwar, the author of the Future Jobs report] to provide some form of response." The email exchange states that "while tacitly looking over Rohit's response, it needs to come from him (rather than Kindred, and certainly not BIS)".Responses to mainstream media criticism of BIS's practice were no better. In response to the Times Higher Education Supplement article, BIS emphasised the "speculative" nature of the research behind the future jobs report. It was left to Talwar to claim that the approach taken is "accepted best practice in horizon scanning". The importance of the THES article was downplayed, with one email exchange citing a single tweet stating that "Jonathan Mendel [quoted in the THES article criticising the future jobs report] is a prat" as evidence that there was little interest in the story. Substantive criticisms from the THES article and elsewhere were not addressed in the documents supplied to us.When preparing a statement on the response to the future jobs report for then science minister, Lord Drayson, a draft saying that the "vast majority" of coverage of the campaign was positive was revised with the effect of marginalising criticism further. The final version simply stated that the campaign "has generated a great deal of positive coverage". Failures by BIS to uphold basic standards raise concerns about how they engage with the professions within their remit and are frankly embarrassing for those of us who work within and are keen to promote the UK's excellent research sector.While BIS failed to redact Hayton's name from the documents released to us and left at least one other individual easily identifiable, they redacted so much from the email exchanges that it is not always clear which organisation is saying what. This is hardly in line with the government's claim that "transparency across all departments [is] a necessary and important part of making government more accountable". We appreciate it can be important to protect the identities of individuals, but there is a public interest in knowing whether particular statements were made by government departments or by contracted organisations.What stood out in the documents BIS released to us was how government, PR agencies and mainstream media worked as a closed and vicious circle. The government commissioned and promoted bad research; PR agencies promoted this to the media and the media overwhelmingly reported the government line. The project was then deemed a success because of the positive media coverage. Critical engagement with research and appropriate analysis of the tools, goals and achievements of research communication were marginalised. Given the damaging nature of such vicious circles, there is a danger that poor policies and practices will go unchallenged because critics are frozen out.We hope the new government will engage better with researchers. This means being open to a genuine dialogue and listening to constructive criticism. Before the election, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats emphasised the need for evidence-based policy, but we have yet to see convincing signs that this is happening. Promises of engagement and evidenced-based policy seem to have become less of a priority than ensuring that mantras of cuts, austerity and reform remain in the headlines.Alexander Holmes is a biologistJonathan Mendel is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of DundeeScience policyPolitics and technologyLiberal-Conservative coalitionPeter MandelsonLabourFreedom of informationAlexander Holmesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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String theory and colour-field splash Using images and art to try and understand science can be helpful, misleading, flaky or fun. But it seems to be inescapable.So on a relaxing Saturday morning, where the fact that my daughter and I are recuperating from colds means I am excused swimming, I finally got around to watching this video I was sent some time ago by Mike Bernstein.I'm sceptical about string theory, and about art appropriating science buzzwords to give itself some intellectual frisson. But I like the imagery here (and the hat) and it set me thinking a bit about how I use pictures to help me understand physics.Various concepts wheeled in to discuss the recent CMS results are known as "colour glass condensate" and "quark-gluon plasma". (Personally it doesn't seem likely to me they have anything to do with it, but we shall see). Even the names "gluon" (the boson which carries the strong force) or "string theory" itself tell you that people are latching on to images from the everyday to help label and understand complex mathematical constructs.Pictures can be helpful, they can also mislead. I guess it is the mathematics and the data which nudge them along the right track, discarding false trails and reinforcing genuine insights. Anyway, thanks Mike for making me think, and I thought I would pass it on. And I do like the pictures too. More of them at the Saatchi online gallery.This isn't a queue to mail me zillions of sciency-arty links, but I would be very happy if you wanted to add some in the comments, as Mike did here.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The human brain unravelled Man has been mapping the human brain for centuries but these days it's a full-colour show in 3DDissecting the brain was a messy affair in the early 16th century when cadavers might spend a while decomposing before finally going under the physician's knife. It was a predicament that Leonardo da Vinci circumvented with characteristic finesse: when he wanted to study deep cavities in the brain, he took the organ from a freshly killed ox and injected it with melted wax, taking care to make a hole at one end for fluid to escape. When the wax had cooled and hardened, he carved away at the brain tissue to reveal an exquisite, life-sized cast of the organ's inner structure.Da Vinci's casts became the basis for the Italian polymath's anatomical sketches in which he set out to document the appearance and even the workings of the brain. There was a lot to unravel and little to build on. One popular theory doing the rounds at the time held that animal spirits coursed through the human brain and crossed internal cavities by way of tubular and presumably hollow nerves.The long history of the brain's depiction, from the first raw sketches of antiquity, through early electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings, to the abstract art of modern-day scanners is charted in the newly published Portraits of the Mind – from which a selection of images are shown here – by Carl Schoonover, a doctoral student in neurobiology at Columbia University in New York. This is a journey that has no end, but one that reveals deeper intricacies with every step. Despite the great discoveries that underpin modern neuroscience, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious object known.The oldest drawing of the nervous system is traced to Cairo circa 1027, when Ibn al-Haytham sketched a nose and two eyes and ran hollow nerves from the latter to the brain. Simplistic it may be, but al-Haytham's depiction captured an essential element of neuroscience: that we observe the world through sensory organs that feed information to the brain. Al-Haytham drew on anatomy learned from studying animals, as both Christian and Islamic worlds placed severe restrictions on human dissection. Physicians only got to grips with the human brain when these laws fell by the wayside. By the mid-17th century, English physician Thomas Willis and his accomplice, Christopher Wren, were drawing the brain in unprecedented detail, as a three-dimensional whole.But it was Italian physician Camillo Golgi who surely deserves credit for the first major leap in teasing apart the stuff of the brain. Golgi was born in 1843 and developed the reazione nera, the "black reaction", which set in train research that continues today. With a simple mixture of potassium dichromate and silver nitrate, Golgi gave scientists the ability to stain – and so highlight – individual brain cells. Under a microscope, these darkened neurons became bold against featureless grey matter. The fine structure of the brain was emerging.Golgi did not benefit most from his discovery. It took a contemporary in Spain, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, to grasp the real potential of Golgi's method. Through years of painstaking and skilled work, Cajal stained, isolated and characterised neurons by appearance and location. The work was divisive, not least for Cajal's relationship with the man whose technique he mastered. Golgi asserted that the brain was a continuous lump of matter, but Cajal proved otherwise. The brain, he said, was a collection of individual but interconnected neurons. Each had a thick soma at heart, from which grew long, thin protrusions called dendrites and axons. The dendrites behaved like receivers and listened for signals from neighbouring neurons, while the axons were transmitters that broadcast the neurons' own messages. Cajal put the neuron centre stage and so marked the birth of modern neuroscience.By the early 20th century, drawings of specific brain regions, such as the neocortex and hippocampus, included fiendishly complicated neural circuits. They were awe-inspiring, but drawn from dead brain matter. What scientists lacked was a way to watch living neurons in action. That problem was overcome in the 1990s, when researchers transferred genes from a bioluminescent jellyfish into growing neurons. At a stroke, the world of neuroscience moved from monochrome to colour. Today, living brain cells can be made to fluoresce in a dazzle of colour, producing images called "brainbows". With them, scientists have mapped out the neural connections that govern our movement, sight and hearing.Parallel developments in microscopy and electrophysiology have unveiled more of the structure of brain cells and allowed scientists to record the activity of single neurons. Meanwhile, whole brain scanning techniques, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are beginning to reveal, with some caution, how regions of the brain help us plan, remember and respond to the world around us. One thousand years after al-Haytham sketched the neural wiring for eyesight, the brain is rendered in rich colour as 3D computer images that can be rotated, flipped and peered inside.It is hard to leaf through Schoonover's book without marvelling at how our view of the brain has been transformed. Still the organ remains a mystery. How do neurons give rise to conscious experience? What form does a memory take? We may not know for another thousand years. Neuroscience is more than the study of the brain. It is an unprecedented opportunity to understand ourselves.NeuroscienceBiologyIan Sampleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |