Jenkintown sits in a sweet spot, train-wise, where three different train lines (and the airport line) pass. Jenkintown was once a shopping mecca, full of department stores and a train that took you all the way to New York City. Now, traffic along Old York Road burns through the borough at a rapid clip, a means of getting people from the city to the mall.

We moved here in 2000, just prior to getting married. My wife and I both took the train to work each day, and planned to have kids, so this place was ideal. However, it took us about 4 years to find a house we like.

Still, I hope to provide what you need to know about Jenkintown.

Jenkintown is roughly .58 miles square, and home to about 4,500 souls and 4,600 people. It was settled in 1697, yet retains few structures dating to that time. (Other than the stuff in the ditch behind the house.) Pumping our awesome cred is the fact that one of the wealthier sections of Abington Township is also called Jenkintown. Hence we get points for Bradley Cooper and Jabril Trawick.

Despite its size, it has two fire companies. The first, Pioneer, was opened in 1884 and the second, Independent, opened in 1889. Going through the library’s archives will tell you that Independent opened, essentially, because Pioneer didn’t allow Catholics (and possibly refused to douse Catholic fires). Yes, Catholics and Protestants didn’t mingle too well then, so much so that certain streets (did I mention this a .58 square mile town?) were off limits to opposing members. Jenkintown apparently had some Klan rallies to boot, but considering that there was only ever a small contingent of African-Americans in Jenkintown, they were probably there to scare the Catholics. Catholics had their time, though, apparently a few years back a majority-Catholic Borough Council sold the property where the old Borough Hall sat to Immaculate Conception, and moved the Borough into a squat ugly bunker a ways off the main center of town. Other than that, the rivalry seems to have dissipated, and Catholics and Protestants are more or less free to mingle. Still prejudices run deep.

Bizarre, if you ask me.

There’s the School, the lifeblood of all Jenkintown. I believe it is what holds this borough together, especially since Old York Road has long since given up that title. The Jenkintown School District goes from kindergarten to 12th grade, and it is so small as to feel like a private school. In fact, I think its enrollment is slightly smaller than Abington Friends School nearby. It helps inflate my taxes, but it also keeps the property values up, so we don’t mind so much. On top of that, it really is an exceptional school. Every so often, we’ll hear a grumble from the Commonwealth about consolidating the Borough’s schools with Abington or Cheltenham. If that happens, we would consider leaving.

There’s the borough government itself. They try very hard given the resources at hand and the Lstrs particularly appreciate their efforts in helping us resolve some drainage issues that turned Stinkbug Manor into a swamp earlier this fall. (My darling wife/professional engineer found a lot of the rumored-records and maps showing the stream that used to run down our street, a stream more-or-less resurrected briefly during Hurricane Irene.)

There’s the Jenkintown Library (Jenkin’s Town Lyceum, I believe the facade says — I once convinced my wife’s friend that we actually lived in Jenkin’s Town).

And, of course, the Hiway Theater, recently restored. They show first-run, more artsy fare on their single screen and kids’ movies on school holidays.

As for bloggers, there are few. I ran a Jenkintown blog about 8 years ago until I got paranoid that my neighbors would realize that I’m writing about them, so in the last few years, all of my Jenkintown posts have been puppy-related. However, my daughter is less interested in taking long walks and shooting puppy pictures with me, so there has been much less of that. Sadly.

There’s Jenkintown Station, which follows the business district’s flailing efforts from the perspective of a recent arrival. I believe the fellow who runs it is a noted regional Diner connoisseur/expert.

Undoubtedly, Jenkintown is a Democratic Party town. You can’t get away from it. However, if you want the minority opinion, you may try Jenkintown Chronicle, which takes its name from Jenkintown’s old paper, which is now part of a conglomerate of Montgomery County titles. It could use a few a pointers on design, or at least a functioning caps lock key. From what I gather, the author is not a Democrat, and that’s all I feel like saying at the moment.

Other J-town Links of Interest

Our storefront population keeps turning over, but there are a few places that are doing quite well. OK, yes there is a shoe repairman that remains inexplicably open and, I think, maybe, a vacuum guy too. But we have a hookah bar (if you’re into that sort of thing) and plenty of real bars to visit. Some Jenkintown places are developing into institutions in their own right.

Chief among those is Rhinoceros Toys led by the indefatigable Kate Pettit. A few years back she turned her (quite successful) bridal shop into a(n even awesomer) toy store. Kate also single-handedly wrangled together Jenkintown’s weekly three-seasonal Farmer’s Market.

Among local eateries, West Ave. Grille has hung in there for good reason. Its reliable, tasty, and always worth a visit.

Another Jenkintown stalwart, Mirna’s Cafe, is the kind of place you’d be comfortable taking your Aunt Myra (or at least, my wife’s Aunt Myra) to when she visits.

I was a little wary when Abner’s BBQ became Rosey’s, but the place is indeed better, making good on its promise of authentic southern barbecue. Or, authentic to me, at least, a committed Pennsylvanian.

As a sign of their goodness, West Ave., Mirna’s and Rosey’s have all recently opened up eateries in Dresher, Blue Bell, and Ambler, respectively. For that matter, I think Rhinoceros has another store in Collingswood, another small, lovely borough, albeit one on the wrong side of the river. (Apologies Jen!)

I’ve only been to 211 York once, but it is an exceptional place, hidden in plain site on Old York Road. There are a lot of good places to eat here in town. To be honest, I wish our borough would play that up a bit more. Retail (outside of specialty places like Rhinoceros) is a hard sell here. We should fill the empty storefronts with restaurants and little eclectic boutiques for post-dinner browsing.

UPDATE 1/10–I added the additional links bit.

Why? Because research often sounds funny. Really. Why else would Palin attack fruit fly research? For the ignorant, it sounds pretty damn frivolous. For the rest of us, its pretty embarrassing to watch.

Now I’m not saying that there’s not waste in government, or even waste in research funding. There probably is. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as say–without any evidence at hand one way or the other–that there probably is waste in federal research funding. Someone, somewhere at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, is funding a research program that they know, in their heart of hearts, will not advance the human body of knowledge one iota. Shocking, I know.

If only Coburn was actually pursuing something like that. No, he’s doing what Proxmire and others did before him, searching through the reams of research grant summaries produced by places like NSF to pick ones that sound silly or frivolous. Its easy enough to do, but will just as likely backfire on you. Again, ask Palin.

You can also ask Mark Sanford. Before Mark was a governor and a famed Appalachian explorer, he was a Republican Congresscritter of the Revolution of ’94 sort. In 1998, he played the same Golden Fleece game, searching the abstract databases of the National Science Foundation (which had become freely online) for funny-sounding award summaries.

To be honest, I did the same thing. I interned in the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA, which I always liked to say as Opa! They learned quickly to keep me away from the dishes.) As a pioneer in open-access government-type stuff, NSF put all their approved grant information online, which was pretty keen in the 90s. As an intern, I was not encumbered by a particular PR “beat” and was given free reign to cover whatever I found interesting, as long as the professional public information officers didn’t mind. I scanned through the award listings and came up with cool stuff like “supermassive” black holes and “doppler on wheels.”

Sanford did the same thing and came up with a remarkable rant on federal funding for ATM research. He wanted to slice almost $200 million from the budget, citing waste on ATM research and other silly things. Only he (or his staffer) didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, if they did, they would have realized that the award abstract referred to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the switching technique that made your lightning fast dorm room ISDN connection so much faster than your parent’s Compuserve account. Cue the sad trombone. (Side note: Sadtrombone.com is apparently defunct so I’ll do it myself: Wah wah wah waaaaah.)

In fairness to Republicans, it was Sanford’s Michigan colleague Vern Ehlers who pointed out Sanford’s error, quashing the budget hack. (Check out this little note in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Even more recently, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, tried to play the Golden Fleece game. Last year, Rep. Smith called for folks to search through NSF’s award database to find other funny-sounding stuff like:

$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Of course, both projects were taken drastically out of context. the soccer study was really a look at smart-swarming, that is how teams can come together to collaborate on complex problems. The “sound of objects breaking” was created for the study of how to recreate realistic noises in a virtual environment, say for search-and-rescue or the military, perhaps? Again, its a bit of irony. The NSF attempts to be responsible with our money, showing us precisely where the dollars are going, only for some political hack to come along, take the work out of context, and use it to further his own political agenda.

Oh, bother.

NSF, which only spends about 5 percent of its budget on administrative costs*, is getting nailed by political hacks for a) openly posting its award information (which is probably mandated by now) and b) funding scientists who often use imprecise or “clever” language in their award application titles and abstracts.

So, Coburn, you want to cut waste? Fine, but realize that federal funding for research is the backbone of our economy. Every new technical advance, therapeutic drug, surgical technique, material and technology we’ve seen in the last 50 years owes its very existence to agencies like the NSF and NIH. Every step forward we’ve made in medicine, technology and industry began in some academic laboratory with government dollars. Research funding is every bit a part of our infrastructure as our roads and bridges (which could also use a little bit of money now that I think of it).

Maybe you could take a little fiscal pride in that Tom, my friend, and a little less happy-dancing over the amount of farm subsidies your rake in for Oklahoma each year.

The fact is, NSF and NIH subject grant applications to peer review. That is, the agencies gather teams of scientists to review the grant applications made by other scientists. The NSF was started that way nearly 60 years ago as a way of making a science of science funding, whereas scientific projects would otherwise be funded through political largesse and budgetary earmarks. In other words, its the opposite of pork.

Money is scarce–only about 1 in 10 grants are ever given funding–so the pressure is on to fund high-impact, low-risk work. (If anything, there is a good argument to be made for funding high-risk work, but that’s not what I’m ranting about today.) Grants that get funding rarely get funded on the first go-around, and a lot of work goes into making sure the money is spent wisely. Note: I can’t think of anywhere else in the Federal government where people work so hard to make sure that taxpayer money is spent well. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Further reading:

* Best proof I can find is here, a report from 4 years ago. I admit, its a little outdated, but I’ve got work to do…

“I’m a complete rationalist,” said Jesse Lebovics, manager of the Olympia and submarine Becuna for the Independence Seaport Museum. “I can explain most of it.

“But [the ship] certainly has a colorful enough history that I think if something were to be around, it makes sense it would be around the Olympia,” Lebovics said.

Sure, Jesse, nice “but” there. I’d think a few ghosts would be mighty convenient for you though.

I don’t necessarily blame the folks who run the Olympia for pitching this story. After all, we’ve seen Eastern State Penitentiary go from moldering historical curiosity to one of the most popular “haunted” places in America by embracing the ghost tourist industry. (By day a historic gem, by night a history-making cash cow.) And the Independence Seaport Museum is still reeling from the scandal left behind by its former president, who ran the place as his own personal cash/political favor machine.

Apparently, the ISM has already pimped out the ship to the ghost TV reality show industry, a necessary first step, I’m sure, before they partner with a ghost tour outfit. That is, if they can put it together in time. According to previous reports, they’re looking to sell it for $20 million or they’ve threatened to sink it off the coast of Cape May. My thinking is that it will join the SS United States and become another ghost ship of Philadelphia.

Um, not in the haunted sense, but the abandoned, looming over Ikea sense…although the Olympia doesn’t necessarily loom over anything.

You want to save the Olympia? Save the waterfront. May my father, a highway engineer since the 60′s, forgive me, but let’s get rid of I-95. The idea is so mad it might work.

UPDATE:

I can’t link it directly, but check out picture number four in the gallery. The caption says it all: “In recordings, Harry Burkhardt says, he has heard voices, including one that told him: ‘Save the ship!’”

Harry, are you certain Jesse wasn’t whispering in your ear?

Still, I’m creeped out.

This critter, below, for example is a squidworm. The forward tentacles are there, I’m sure, to rape your mind.

Apparently, squidward squidworm was identified during a 2007 expedition to the Celebes Sea, near Borneo.

From the expedition’s chief scientist, Larry Madin:

When we got down nearer the bottom with the ROV, we encountered the most unusual and unfamiliar animal of all. When we first spotted it, people watching the video called out “squid,” “no, shrimp,” “maybe a fish,” “I think it’s a worm.” It did turn out to be a worm, but like nothing we had ever seen before. A worm almost 10 centimeters long, swimming with a row of paddles formed from stiff bristles, and with 10 long, writhing tentacles coming out of its head. No wonder we thought it could be a squid! We did end up calling it the “squidworm.” We think it may be an undescribed species, but none of us are experts on polychaete worms, so we’ll have to wait until a real specialist can tell us more about it.

Senator’s Daughter Found – Mrs. Hallowell Irwin, daughter of the late Senator Thomas B. Harper, who mysteriously disappeared from her home in Jenkintown, several weeks ago, was found in a hotel in New York and brought back to home at Jenkintown on Saturday. Although no reason is ascribed for Mrs. Irwin’s absence, which kept her relatives worried for some time, it is believed that she became despondent immediately after her father’s death and wandered away.

Two sentences, but a whole world of mystery.

Also, unrelated but in the same article:

Boy Dies of Lockjaw – Valek Dranaka, aged 17 years, of Bridgeport, died on Saturday in the Norristown Hospital of lockjaw, which developed from blood poisoning, following a wound on the leg near the ankle, the result of having been struck with the iron point of a bobbin while at work in Loes’ mill, Bridgeport.

Just a reminder that life was harder, death more frequent. This young boy, who should have been in high school, but was working in a mill, killed because his nicked ankle became infected. Think about that the next time you hear someone cranking on about modern medicine.

…and when I get one, it’ll have this:

Hokey smokes!

I can draw a direct line between this interest and the fact that both times my parents took me to Walt Disney World as a kid (at age 5 and again at 10), we stayed at the Polynesian Resort. Something about the combination of indoor fountains and air conditioning still gets to me. (I can draw a similar line to my love of monorails.)

That’s why I loved this quick review of the “Boutiki” shop at the resort. I won’t steal any of Shawn Slater’s images, so you’ll have to click the link yourself.

The reasons for this are obvious, chief among those are budgetary. CGI still costs money today, and these things were made in the late 90s. Beside, why spend the money on background dinosaurs? It would only confuse viewers anyway. It does, however, deprive viewers of the notion. Still, this isn’t a post to review a decade-old documentary, no matter how watchable it remains. (If updated, I’m sure it would simply feature more feathers, which seems to be the way our notions of dinosaurs are evolving.)

Besides, the kids love Dinosaur Train and we felt it was time to show them the truth about dinosaurs, that Laura the Giganotosaurus wouldn’t necessarily get along with little Ned the Brachiosaurus…and not just because they come from different ends of the Cretaceous.

Last night we watched the Cruel Sea episode, featuring gigantic liopleurodons — the big nasties of their day — and plesiousaur-like cryptoclidus. Certainly, the Jurassic seas would be teeming with more than just five or six species of beast. Most of which, I’m sure would kill you if you were there, much like I perceive anything off the coast of Australia, from salt water crocs (who would be at home in the Cretaceous) to great white sharks (ditto) to teeny cute little octopuses that will kill you if you accidentally step on them.

The truth is that it took a vast ecosystem to support apex predators like liopleurodons and smaller fish-eaters like cryptoclidus. That’s why I am always fascinated with people who claim that the various lake and river monsters around the world are plesiosaurs. And they never see small plesiousaurs either, like cryptoclidus, which measured in at about three meters. But even at three meters, a herd or pod or whatever the hell you call a group of these things would require a lot of fish to eat. And there would have to be more than one. Even if this particular lake monster was the last of its long-lived kind, one would think you’d find fossil evidence of recent critters of its kind around.

Take this story for example, the Hawkesbury River beastie. Now, color me a judgmental skeptic (which would be chartreuse, perhaps?), but I’m going to go off the bat with doubts that they have a dinosaur in their river.

Descriptions of the Hawkesbury River Monster liken it to the prehistoric plesiosaur, an aquatic dinosaur 70 million years extinct.

The Loch Ness monster is also said to be related to the same extinct creature. How the Nessie myth is similar to our own, HERE

Mr Jones said plesiosaurs did exist in Australia, but ther was no evidence of them inhabiting the Hawkesbury River.

However both Mr Gilroy and Mr Jones describe the aquatic dinosaur as grey and mottled in colour, with a large bulky body, two sets of paddle-like flippers, a long neck and serpent-like head and thick, eel-like tail.

Sighting reports describe it as about 24m long. Mr Jones said the plesiosaur grew up to 10m long.

Mr Gilroy said he and his field assistant Greg Foster may have sighted the creature last August, from a high bank near Wiseman’s Ferry.

They described seeing a dark, bulky shape with a long neck about a metre from the surface.

Its movements caused surface disturbance which appeared to suggest a marine creature with two sets of flippers and a tail, Mr Gilroy said.

The Mr. Jones quoted here Robert Jones, a paleontologist from the Australia Museum, and if you notice here that the reporter suggests that Jones and the cryptophile Gilroy are describing similar creatures, although at no point does he mention Gilroy seeing anything more than a long-neck. All of this sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds like Nessie and Champie, both lake creatures purported to be plesiosaurs and also purported to be among the legendary creatures of the local natives. I’m just going to through this out there and say that, perhaps, they are not seeing similar creatures but, instead, they are seeing similar phenomena, whether it is an animal or just a convincing mixture of logs and currents.

Ben Radford, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, wrote a great book with Joe Nickell about lake monsters, called Lake Monster Mysteries, in fact. In it, they investigate a number of the world’s great lake monsters and generally find sincere, thoughtful people, like Gilroy, who are absolutely convinced that they see a plesiosaur.

From their conclusion:

Although many sane and sincere people think they are seeing lake leviathans, in all likelihood they are encountering something they misperceive as such. We have given many examples in this book, including otters, eels, logs, and beavers. These eyewitnesses are not foolish; they are subject to the same psychological and perceptive errors that plague all of us from time to time.

I don’t doubt that these people think that they’re seeing something in Hawkesbury river. They’re not crazy, although their conclusions are more than a little premature. And I don’t doubt that Aborigines, Native Americans and ancient Celts all saw something similar in Hawkesbury, Lake Champlain and Loch Ness, respectively. (Of course, they interpreted these things as dragons and serpents and whatever a moolyewonk is, since they didn’t know about plesiosaurs.) Something like a 24 meter plesiosaur, however, would be awfully tough to hide. They’re air breathers, they need to eat a lot of fish, and they laid eggs on land.

Having one of these in your lake or river, no matter how well it hides, would have some affect on the local environment. It would be like having JD Salinger in your neighborhood. He may not be available for interviews and photographs, but the neighbors have seen him and he still gets mail delivery.

You see, when the carcass lands on the bottom of the sea, a whole host of unpleasant critters come out to eat it in a process that can take months — or even years if the whale lands in deep, deep water. Among those critters are members of the genus Osedax, bone-eating worms related to tubeworms or those guys you see hanging out by thermal vents…if you happen to go past a lot of thermal vents, that is.

Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute first discovered these little red bone-munching guys while out in the ROV Tiburon, which is a vehicle with just an awesome name. Their press release provides a great read. (And, doesn’t he look like something out of central casting for ocean explorer?)

Sure, unless your diet has really slipped and you’ve reached blue whale proportions, you don’t have much to worry about from these critters (aside from the fact that you’d be dead and lacking cares, in general). But the fact that these guys are down there waiting…just waiting…gives me the creeps.

Even creepier is that all those little red wigglers you see in the picture above are all females. They’re not hermaphrodites. Oh no, that would be normal in comparison. All of these worms are actually giant masters over their microscopic male concubines. That’s right, mini sex slaves. Invertebrates with a dwarf fetish.

But, according to Vrijenhoek, “That was not the end of the weirdness. In looking at the worms under a microscope, we discovered that every one of them was a female. We didn’t find any males until I got another call from Greg Rouse. He said, ‘Bob, it’s worse than you think.’ I said, ‘What now, Greg?’ He said ‘There really are males, but they are microscopic. They are dwarfs!’”

Sure enough, living within the tube that enclosed each female were 30 to 100 microscopic male worms, each only about a millimeter long. Not only that, but the male worms were still in a larval stage of development. They were making sperm in one part of their bodies, while other parts of the bodies still contained the yolk droplets. As Vrijenhoek put it, “These males don’t feed. A male lives its entire life off the yolk that was provisioned by the egg from which it hatched. This is one of the few cases in the animal world where sexually reproducing individuals are barely more developed than eggs. It’s weird.”

Sometimes I think it you are less likely to see an exaggeration in a corporate release about a clinical trial than in an academic press release. The corporate flack is beholden to a separate set of rules much stricter than those seen in non-profit academic centers. (In general, however, they overcompensate their bland, corporate releases by being complete PsITAs when it comes to pitching their stories. What isn’t generally well known is how hard they try leaning on academic flacks to do their dirty work for them. In my experience, at least. )

According to Goldacre, among the chief flack crimes is not correctly depicting the size and quality of the research described. I know from experience that some press release editors frown on including such materials, assuming that good journalists would follow up and actually read the study and speak to the reporters. That might have been a safe assumption at one point, but no longer, since many press releases get picked up and used online (and often in print) verbatim.

Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire took one year’s worth of press releases from 10 medical research centres {The Annals tipsheet, quoted below, mentions 20, hmmm… –Greg}, a mixture of the most eminent universities and the most humble, as measured by their US News & World Report ranking. These centres each put out around one press release a week, so 200 were selected at random and analysed in detail.

Half of them covered research done in humans, and as an early clue to their quality, 23% didn’t bother to mention the number of participants – it’s hard to imagine anything more basic – and 34% failed to quantify their results. But what kinds of study were covered? In medical research we talk about the “hierarchies of evidence”, ranked by quality and type. Systematic reviews of randomised trials are the most reliable: because they ensure that conclusions are based on all of the information, rather than just some of it; and because – when conducted properly – they are the least vulnerable to bias.

He is absolutely right of course, depicting the quality of the study is every bit as important as spelling the lead researchers name correctly. (To be totally honest, I’ve probably failed on both accounts in the course of the hundreds of clinical science releases I’ve written.) And I couldn’t imagine writing a release that didn’t report the number of people in a study. However, it is entirely appropriate for such information to be placed further down in the release. Not buried, mind you, along with the boilerplate and the acknowledgments-you-know-people-won’t-read-but-you-add-anyway-to-appease-the-scientist’s-collaborators. It is also very tricky to explain studies in terms lay audiences might understand without including a few extra paragraphs explaining what a P value means. Again, there is a middle ground, but it behooves flacks to mention the statistical significance of the study they’re promoting. Even a small study with few people can be significant, a fact lost on most folks, flacks especially.

Probably a bigger crime, one that Goldacre doesn’t address directly and is probably not part of the study, is the inability to distinguish between animal and human trials. Many institutions shy away from mentioning animal models as a rule, since people often react angrily — even violently — to the shocking news that you may be working on lab rats. In the past, I’ve used the term “animal model” instead of specifying rat or mouse, which were usually the animal involved. If the study involved a primate, I would have to say something and risk the reaction.

I haven’t read the Dartmouth study myself, but it doesn’t appear that the sin of omission isn’t the only source of exaggeration noted in releases. Here is how the Annals of Internal Medicine’s press tipsheet summarized it:

The news media is often criticized for exaggerating science stories and deliberately sensationalizing the news. However, researchers argue that sensationalism may begin with the journalists’ sources. The researchers reviewed 200 press releases from 20 academic medical centers. They concluded that academic press releases often promote research with uncertain relevance to human health without acknowledging important cautions or limitations. However, since the researchers did not analyze news coverage stemming from the press releases, they could not directly link problems with press releases with exaggerated or sensational reporting. The study authors suggest that academic centers issue fewer releases about preliminary research, especially unpublished scientific meeting presentations. By issuing fewer press releases, academic centers could help reduce the chance that journalists and the public are misled about the importance or implications of medical research.

The problem is that the act of sending out a press release fundamentally risks exaggeration by calling attention to something. Even if you are perfectly clear that the study is small and adds but an incremental bit of information to the larger scientific world, the very fact you are writing a release is calling attention to it. And, of course, you can write the least sensational press release in the world and still have it taken out of context by a reporter looking for lurid headlines.

I’d also like to know what the researchers consider cautions or limitations. According to the Goldacre piece, 58% of releases lack these sorts of things. That’s a fairly high number that, doing the gut check, might be a matter of perspective. Would an un-read disclaimer — in the “forward-looking views”-sense — be viewed as proper caution? Were some releases entirely “cautious” while others not so complete in their cautioning?

So, should institutions send out fewer releases? Some, perhaps, but that’s a superficial answer. I know some places that have instituted a quota system on public relations people and use press releases as a measure of productivity. I think that is a poor practice that practically guarantees shoddy releases, of course. Then again, I’ve worked in places where I would have sent out twice the amount of news releases if I had the time, because the science there was just that plentiful and interesting. It isn’t all that cut and dry.

Press officers are always told to look for clinical relevance in basic science stories. They are told that journalists won’t write about it otherwise. This has a certain bit of truth to it, of course. The journalist you pitch must often, in turn, pitch an editor, who will generally ask about “the point of it all.” The horror.

The majority of biomedical press releases I have written have been about laboratory results. Basic science stuff, molecules bopping into each other, and all. And here you must work hard not to exaggerate the potential clinical use of those findings. Releases like these are often written with the trade press in mind as often — if not more often — than the popular press.

Why? Because, when done well, it helps establish researchers and their institutions as productive and interesting. Because basic science does, in fact, lead to advanced medicine. Because the noise beats signal out there and someone must shepherd the good science around the din.

Still, it is up to the press officer to be an advocate for their institution as well as responsibly advocate the science. That’s where it helps to find a useful story angle to pitch…which, when done thoughtlessly, inevitably leads to the use of the words “holy grail” or, worse, a reference to Star Trek. The trick is to pitch the story behind the science as well as the science itself in order to find the relevance, a feat that is far easier said than done.

With fewer science reporters out there it has become — for better or worse — incumbent upon public affairs people (PIOs, Flacks) to tell the story right the first time.