EDITORIAL: Do let’s argue

The future of The Science Reporter

The first issue of The Science Reporter (TSR) that I remember seeing, back in the mid ‘90s, contained a slanging match between Bill O’Neill, then of The Guardian, and Roger Highfield, then of The Daily Telegraph, about broken embargoes during that year’s BA (now the British Science Association) meeting. Highfield was complaining that O’Neill’s ‘preview’ of the event the week before had made it impossible for anyone else to run stories during the conference because they were seen as old news (all I can remember about O’Neill’s position was that he had no regrets and that he was somewhat dismissive of Highfield’s use of his title: Dr).

If anything convinced me that I had made the right decision in joining the ABSW, it was this exchange.

This is why, when I was asked to take over TSR, my first thought was that every issue should start with a debate of some real issue about the process of writing about science and technology. You’ll see the first of these debates ⎯ on whether we rely too much on press releases ⎯ in this issue. Participate: tell us what you think of the arguments and share your own experience/insights via the comments feature. Also, please contact me. I’d like to know what you think of the idea of debates in general, how well or badly we handled this one in particular, and to get your suggestions for future debates and possible participants. To get you thinking, you can see a first-draft list at the end of this editorial.

We’ve also tried to include in the newsletter all the major features that were in the old printed version: books, events, news, features, new members etc. (heartfelt thanks to all those who helped us put it together). If there’s a section you feel we should have that we don’t, let me know. And of course, if at any point there’s something you think that we should be covering, let us know that too (preferably before the fact rather than after).

Finally, a quick note on form. As you’ll see in Mike Nagle’s news piece, we’re in the middle of a major redesign of the website, which will eventually incorporate all our various methods of communication. The HTML newsletter that got you to this blog is an interim measure that we expect to last 2-3 issues. We may do something similar in future, or something very different. For instance, among other things we’re considering using an automated system to create PDFs because we know that some people like to have something they can print out and read on paper. If you feel strongly about this, now is the time to let us know your opinion.

Let me finish by saying that I hope you enjoy this issue and, if you don’t, I hope you’ll tell me why: either by e-mailing me or by leaving a comment here.

Sunny Bains
Editor, The Science Reporter

Possible debate topics:

• Is medical journalism really science journalism?
• Do embargoes help produce better science coverage?
• Is there more PR influence in science and technology than many other topics?
• Can you write well about scientific papers you can't understand?
• Do you always have to hype a science and technology story to get it published?
• Is it ethical to accept places on press junkets?
• Is the technical (rather than popular) press the place to find real journalism?

Shibboleth

Ted Nield ventures up “Doris’s crack” and finds out about what sets the scientific sensibility apart...

You’ve got to hand it to Doris Salcedo, of the now world-famous Tate Modern crack. It's not just art with an edge – it’s art with two edges. And if art these days is supposed to be dangerous, then this piece certainly is. Several members of the public – people who had presumably gone there expressly to see the thing – have already fallen into it.

What’s Shibboleth about? It’s all in the title, the word deriving from the practice of the people of Gilead, east of the River Jordan, who according to the Old Testament used that word to root out their sworn enemies Ephraimites (one of the 12 tribes of Israel) as they tried to cross the Jordan. Ephraimites, unable to say “sh”, gave themselves away immediately. Doris’s crack is all about racism, and all intolerance that engenders division.

So much for the art bit.

The widening crack starts as a hairline fracture under a dustbin near the entrance. It then gradually becomes a stiletto-snapper, forks like lightning, vanishes under walls, and finally widens into a chasm large enough to swallow any unsupervised child with no sense of personal danger, revealing what seems to be fence-wire embedded in its walls – recalling the great symbolic boundaries of our time – the Berlin Wall, Guantanamo Bay, the compound in Ardman Animation’s Chicken Run, and so forth. Shibboleth stretches the 167 metre length of the Hall and, at its most Grand Canyon-like, is about 30 centimetres wide and a metre deep.

What strikes me about this piece is how people’s reactions to it have divided the artists from the public. While the artist witters on about her profound meaning, most of the visitors are more interested in how it was done. On this, Doris herself and the Tate, have remained silent – fearing no doubt that mundane concern with technique (something conceptual artists usually scorn, for obvious reasons) will crowd out questions about “meaning” and the artist's intentions. Compared to these supposed profundities, concern about how the trick was pulled is merely technical - leading only to proximal rather than ultimate causes. Philosophically such reasons hardly seem grand enough. Nevertheless, this work has stimulated the question “how” like few others.

This must be encouraging because “how” is the scientist’s question. Geologists and engineers spend a lot of time staring up cracks because they tell them a lot. Is this metal casting about to break? Is this building about to drop on my head? Is this continent about to rift from its neighbour? Answers to all these interesting and useful questions can all be found in the humble crack. Scientists ask the question “how” because it leads them to understanding something about the way Nature works. How do mountains rise? How do faults move? How can a crack appear in the floor, widen at the speed your toenails grow, and become the Atlantic Ocean? Science can’t tell you why any of this happens, but it can tell you how. And this is useful knowledge – we cannot say why the HIV virus exists, and it is pointless asking. But we can find out how.

So for my money, the question “how” is exactly the one we should be encouraging the public to ask. The search for ultimate causes leads us only into the barren wastes of a philosophical Gilead - the supernatural – exactly what divides more people in the world from their neighbours than anything else. If we could but unite behind the question “how”, the reign of the shibboleth is over.

• (Incidentally, spies at Tate Modern have revealed that the plastic moulds for the crack's sides were flown in to the UK from the artist's home. Visitors were then prevented from viewing the Turbine Hall by sheets of paper covering the windows that overlook it as an excavator dug a long, deep trench. The sculpted plastic moulds of the final crack's visible walls were then lowered into the trench, and liquid concrete that matched the floor skim perfectly was poured in. The visible moulded walls of the wider parts of the work, where the chicken-wire can be seen, were then painted to increase their verisimilitude. TN)

The latest issue is now available

You can now retrieve a PDF file of the latest issue of The Science Reporter. The file is at the end of this link.