Over at the Forum (well, a forum, anyways), a denizen complains that the Press does not identify the 'scientist' in headlines of the sort "Moon cheese makes your toenails grow, say scientists". This is, our complainant complains (um, sorry about that) in contrast to the treatment of 'celebrities' by the media; "The actor Russell Crowe told reporters that", and that this difference serves to reinforce the gulf that exists between media attitudes towards entertainers and scientists.
Check the BBC news pages and you'll notice that they nearly always start their science news stories with the word 'scientists' appearing as the subject (e.g. Scientists have discovered that...'. Contrast this with their approach to entertainers, who will usually be named as the subject, and their discipline will be added as a subject complement (e.g. The actor Russell Crowe told reporters that...)
Now, I'm a little confused about this, because I don't think that most scientists actually sign on in order to be famous. We'd all like to discover DNA, say, but we know that such paradigm shifts are rare and as long as we can persuade the granting agencies to continue our secret projects to maintain secret cheese-making factories on the moon staffed entirely by Lego® Mindstorms™ robots, we're happy.
Our agitator, however, demands recognition on behalf of all scientific disciplines and exhorts us to rise up and be counted.
It's not true, anyway. Randomly clicking through the BBC News to find evidence for or against his hypothesis (see? Science. Testing things) I found the headline
A greener way to recover methane
that says
A report in Nature has shown how crude oil in deposits around the world is naturally broken down by microbes to methane.
Scientists say that increasing microbe activity. . .
So far, so consistent with. But then, four sentences (and don't get me started on the whole 1 sentence = 1 polypeptidearagraph thing) further on,
"The main thing is you'd be recovering a much cleaner fuel," says co-author Steve Larter, a petroleum geologist from the University of Calgary.
making the hypothesis look pretty damned shaky.
I would not have bothered bringing this to your attention, but my eye was caught by someone at Imperial College, who writes
Prof Sian Harding was featured in the Sunday edition of The Star. She's one of the research groups in my department. My dad asked why was she featured and not my bosses. Well, its because:
1. She is a pharmacologist and therefore huge clinical potential aka more relevance to everyday life.
2. She has a huge lab made up of an army of lab butt monkeys aka phd students and post docs.
and the clincher?
3. If anyone from the media tried to contact my boss, he would probably tell them to sod off.
There you go. The last thing we want while ironing out bugs in secret cheese-making etc. is some damned journalist wanting to know our name (thank you, John Proctor).
