What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
Showing posts with label lancet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lancet. Show all posts
Jul 17, 2014
Specialist - in depth - beat reporters - or just cheerleaders, captured by their sources ?
In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.
Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !
Why not ?
I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.
Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.
But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.
These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.
(Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)
During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.
A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.
For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !
I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .
They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?
William L Laurence - the New York Times science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.
But surely , he can't be the only one....
* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.
Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !
Why not ?
I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.
Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.
But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.
These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.
(Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)
During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.
A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.
For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !
I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .
They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?
William L Laurence - the New York Times science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.
But surely , he can't be the only one....
* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.
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