Still, I wonder if other professions will be inspired to suggest the
same thing. Perhaps accountants will lobby for accountancy to be shown in
a good light and not just interest ing when someone indulges in cooking
the books. But rather than place scientists in such everyday situations
by sleight of hand, the best way to portray scientists as human and indeed
science as a vital part of our culture, as important as painting pictures,
playing football or composing music (and a darn sight more useful), is to
use science as the storyline. Sadly, when this has been done the image of
scientists portrayed is appalling.

One recent drama, Chimera, about a cross between a human and a chimpanzee
that slaughtered almost everyone it encountered, showed scientists in a
very negative way, obsessive, greedy, giving the impression that the morals
didn’t matter as it was the science that was important. ‘I don’t approve
or disapprove – I’m a scientist,’ the attractive female scientist said.

A reworking of the well-worn formula of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
Chimera was poorly researched and used crummy science. And its image of
scientists couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is, and the debates
about the Human Genome Project, embryo research and gene therapy show this,
it’s the scientists themselves initiate debate about what they should and
should not do.

Bad science, bad politics, bad relationships and bad war can make good
drama. Look at the poor light the excellent film The Silence of the Lambs
casts on psychiatry. But how much better drama can be made out of good science.
Life Story, the tale of the discovery of the structure of DNA, showed how
real events can be made into good drama.

Fictional storylines, based on good science and supportable speculation,
can do the same even if it is as trivial as a futuristic story of humanity’s
survival against the problems of global warming. But instead we get a series
that shows scientists as monsters making monsters.

We don’t need scientists in soap operas, but absorption of science into
the popular perception of culture – an uphill struggle in a culture that
regards lack of interest in science as intellectually respectable. We also
need scientists in Parliament.

Perhaps the Save British Science campaign or New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ itself should
sponsor a campaign to get 50 MPs with a background in science elected by
the end of the century. After all, a scientific training helps one to evaluate
a problem and consider solutions in a logical way. And that’s something
that many politicians can’t be accused of.

David Whitehouse is the BBC’s Science Correspondent.

Every Wednesday afternoon there is a scramble to get hold of copies
of such journals as Nature, the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Science,
the New England Journal of Medicine and others (the scramble for Nature
is not as frantic as for the others as they have the foresight to send out
a week earlier a summary of research papers being published along with names
and telephone numbers . . . bliss!). This is accompanied by ‘looking at
the wires’, which is actually a search of stories that appear on the various
international electronic news services written by someone who may have a
few hours advantage over you because of international time differences.

Stories on research papers from these journals are embargoed until midnight
preceding the day of publication, for instance 0001 hours on Thursday for
Nature. This means we can deal with them from the midnight news onwards,
but we usually save them up for the morning programmes.

The idea of an embargo is a laudable one. It coordinates coverage of
stories in the media, allowing stories to be written, checked, interviews
to be conducted and broadcast. What you read in the paper is what you hear
on the radio or see on the TV, same story, same day, everywhere.

To be honest, we all play the embargo game and are all winners and losers
by it when someone pushes the story out a day or a programme ahead of the
embargo. Sometimes it’s a good thing. When you hear that someone else is
about to break the embargo you can break it yourself.

But why does a scientist who has had his or her research accepted for
publication in a scientific journal have to wait for it to be published
before they can allow the media to talk about it? The number of times each
week I talk to a scientist who is quite willing to talk about their work
informally but won’t be interviewed because ‘it’s not published yet and
if it hits the media the journal may pull it’! When this happens the decision
to be made is whether to wait for publication to deal with the story, or
to go with it before if it is considered important enough (and have the
researcher not speak to you again).

Most of us would agree that science that has been accepted for publication
is probably safer than science that has yet to jump that hurdle. But sometimes
one hesitates to ask a scientist telling you something fascinating ‘Is it
being published, and where?’

Surely the important point is that the research has been accepted for
publication. If this was the criterion for allowing publicity, then many
more stories would reach the air-waves. The BBC is, after all, a news organisation,
and we won’t put out on Monday a story from the previous Thursday’s Nature.

Much medical research in Britain is paid for by medical charities which
understandably want the best publicity for their work they can get. At the
moment they run the risk of having their work diluted or ignored if it is
published the same week as an important news event. Sometimes you can tell
far in advance that their good work will get little publicity because of
a known news event. They should have a greater say in how, and when, their
work is publicised.

I’m not totally against embargoes. From my point of view, working for
a news organisation, the peg of ‘published today’ is a good one. But there
should be more freedom, perhaps to elect to be in the embargo and not be
automatically held to ransom by a journals editor. Most people get their
science from the news media, and those of us passionately concerned with
communicating science can see good opportunities to do so being wasted.

David Whitehouse is science correspondent for BBC News and Current Affairs.