Join us in congratulating Chris as we bid him a temporary farewell.

Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity

“Everybody got mad at me, and they tried to fire me, but they couldn’t, cause I was on a fellowship,” remembers Paulson. But the longtime dean of science writers, David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, loved it. “Never do PR,” he advised Paulson. “Always be a journalist.”

Seattle is fortunate that for 22 years, from 1987 to 2009, this irreverent troublemaker of a reporter went un-fired at the Post Intelligencer, where he covered health and science and was for many years responsible for putting out the paper’s weekly science page. During that time, Paulson took the lead on a number of important stories, including raising awareness about Seattle’s serious earthquake risk (now common knowledge, but barely recognized a few decades ago) and covering the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, in which three children died in the Pacific Northwest and 450 were sickened. In the aftermath, Paulson tailed CDC investigators as they tried to figure out how the bad meat got into the system. “I traveled all around the country, went to meatpacking plants, got chased off by guys with guns,” he remembers. “It was sort of breaking-news detective science, and I was trying to explain to people how with a bug like this, we wouldn’t have known about it if not for a public surveillance system.” In the face of more recent food safety scares involving tomatoes and peanut products, as well as the current influenza outbreak, this sort of reporting is critical for protecting public safety and informing better health policies.

Over time, however, Paulson noticed a change at the Post Intelligencer. His editors, he says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing. “Everything was being driven by web hits,” Paulson observes. “And if they didn’t think a story was going to get a lot of web hits, they didn’t want me to write about it.” Seattle is a very important research hub, with scientists at the top of their fields in a number of areas, such as the study of the genome. The region is also, of course, a hub for numerous software, microchip, and biotech companies, as well the aerospace industry. Yet Paulson found it harder and harder to sneak real science into the paper.

Many of us know what happened next: In March of this year, Seattle went from a two paper to a one paper town as the Post Intelligencer put out its final print edition and went web-only. It is now the equivalent of a news aggregator site without much original journalism. Paulson lost his job, as did many other journalists. He is currently on a one-year severance as he casts about considering what to do next.

When I hung out with him recently for two days in Seattle—Paulson is head of the Northwest Science Writers’ Association, one of the most active such local groups in the country, which had had me out to speak—we drank “paradigm shift” martinis at the restaurant Andaluca and he explained to me his plan—or rather, his plans. He has some intriguing ideas, not least of which is a book proposal whose contents I won’t reveal. He has also thought about trying to start a U.S. “science media center,” parallel to those that exist in the UK and Australia, to help put non-specialist journalists in touch with scientific sources and stories. Meanwhile, he has of course snapped up a lot of freelance writing assignments.

But at the same time, Paulson is also going back to doing the kind of work he did long before he was a science writer or even a publicist: part time carpentry and building contracting. When I chased him down to chat for this column, he was out procuring materials for a job. Paulson doesn’t dislike the work—a visit to his home in Seattle, much of which he designed and built, shows that he’s a committed tinkerer. But still, there can be little doubt that something serious has been lost in Seattle with the decrease in its number of staff science journalists. In Paulson’s words:

I’d say the media in general here is more subject to spin. Fewer stories are being told through the mainstream media, and if you talk to the press officers at the institutions, they’re very frustrated with the fact that they will send out releases, and they’ll have something that’s a pretty big deal, and it won’t even show up in Seattle media. Because if the Seattle Times science reporter is already busy, it isn’t even going to get out there. So it sounds self-serving, but I think there’s less science news getting out now in Seattle.

Paulson emphasizes that what he has experienced isn’t unique—it’s “the same thing other people are going through too.” But that’s precisely the point. In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

QED: In only nine months Rick has had a tremendous impact on SP and throughout the organization. Considering his tough-minded reputation, Rick immediately took the public impression of Science Progress‘s serious intent to the next level. He has, as expected, written smart and insightful columns on topics like stem cell policy and biodiversity. Over the next few weeks our SP-based anthology, Science Next, will appear in bookstores. He has also had a less visible but equally important influence on the ongoing dialogue at CAP about science and public policy. From my point of view, Rick has lent his stature to the argument we have made when the very idea of Science Progress was germinating at CAP, that progressivism and science are deeply related and that that relationship will help to write the American future, as it has our past.

Rick now takes his leave for a position in the Obama administration, in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. There is simply no one in the country more qualified to convey the president’s science policy to the American people, nor to help the president craft policy in light of the best evidence. It is hard to lose a colleague who is so smart, so generous with his time and ideas, and so much fun. But we are all damn lucky that he’s going to work for us. Rick, as they used to say in the wires…

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Now it’s time for a silver bullet of sorts, or a wooden stake, to put that tired quote to rest at last.

The quote was from Ronald McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and the topic was human embryonic stem cells. In an interview I did for The Washington Post in 2004, I asked McKay why so many people kept talking about the possibility that injections of stem cells into the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease might someday cure these people when, in fact, the scientific consensus at the time (and still today) was that such injections were unlikely to benefit such patients.

Alzheimer’s, after all, affects such a large part of the brain that treating it with injections of cells would almost certainly be futile. (Parkinson’s disease, by contrast, involves a very small area in the brain so has real of hope of being helped by injections of replacement cells there.) So why did people keep saying that stem cell injections might someday cure the disease?

“To start with, people need a fairy tale,” McKay told me. “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”

I had a feeling that quote would come back to haunt McKay, but as a journalist, that was not really my problem. He said it on the record and it struck me as true; people often do want to believe there is hope, even where there is little.

What I didn’t know was that conservative opponents of embryonic stem cell research would take that comment and repeat it over and over—increasingly out of context—until it had taken on a meaning that McKay never intended and that no scientist believes is true. Specifically, these opponents have used the quote to argue that embryonic stem cells have no potential role to play whatsoever in the search for treatments for Alzheimer’s. So let’s just set the record straight: That is simply not the case, and I will explain why.

I bring this up now because last week, yet again, McKay’s quote was resurrected, this time by conservative blogger Ed Morrissey. He used it to chide President Obama, who said during his news conference last week that stem cells could prove valuable “to find cures for Parkinson’s or for Alzheimer’s….”

“Alzheimer’s?” Morrissey wrote in response. “Would embryonic stem cells hold promise for Alzheimer’s?” That’s when he dredged up my old article—the one with the fairy tale quote from McKay—in which I wrote about a scientific consensus that “of all the diseases that may someday be cured by embryonic stem cell treatments, Alzheimer’s is among the least likely.…”

Here is what Morrissey and his ilk keep ignoring: Just because injections of stem cells into the brain are not likely to cure Alzheimer’s does not mean the cells are not uniquely able to help scientists find a cure for this devastating disease.

Recall that the whole beauty of embryonic stem cells is that they can develop into any cell type. Among the cell types they can become are brain cells, including the kinds of neurons that go bad in Alzheimer’s.

Exactly why these cells lose function in some people as they age remains a mystery. Scientists know that the problem seems related to the buildup of proteins around these neurons, but they know little about the genetic or other underpinnings of the problem. And there are obviously very few things a researcher can do to observe this process up close as it happens, since it is happening inside people’s skulls.

Imagine, though, being able to watch a neuron undergo its natural development and aging process in a laboratory dish. And imagine being able to compare this process in normal brain cells and in brain cells bearing the subtle molecular differences that scientists have so far found to be characteristic of at least some varieties of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, you don’t need to imagine this because it is already being done, thanks to embryonic stem cells.

Scientists are using these cells to create normal neurons and abnormal neurons with many of the characteristics of Alzheimer’s. They are using them not only to compare them, but to be able to test various chemical compounds and potential medicines to see which of these compounds might have salutary effects on the ailing neurons. They are using them, in short, to do studies that could never be done in patients and that, in fact, could never be done in laboratory dishes were it not for the newfound ability to grow them from embryonic stem cells.

“We’re in the process of building a large program in San Diego with industry to use human neurons generated from human embryonic stem cells lines … to test and search for new drugs for Alzheimer’s,” Larry Goldstein told me just last week. Goldstein is a leading stem cell scientist at the UCSD School of Medicine, and one of many in the field tired of the bogus use of McKay’s fairy-tale quote by people with political or religious reasons to oppose embryonic stem cell research generally. “We are introducing by molecular means the genetic changes that cause hereditary Alzheimer’s disease into existing stem cell lines …for drug discovery.”

The approach has every chance of identifying targets in Alzheimer’s neurons that new drugs might attack to slow the disease, stop it, or perhaps someday even to reverse it. And that is extremely important for a disease such as Alzheimer’s, not only because it takes such an awful toll on patients and their families but because the cupboard of potential therapies, at this point, is nearly bare.

“We’ve got almost nothing,” Goldstein said, noting that the few FDA-approved Alzheimer’s medicines have modest beneficial effects at best. “And we’ve got very little in the pipeline, so radical new approaches really are needed.”

Will it work? Goldstein’s answer is optimistic but sensible—not so much a fairy tale as a fable from Aesop: “Any new approach might fail,” he said. “But it absolutely will fail if you don’t try.”

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

As it happens, I stand in a rather interesting place to discuss this, having just moved my own co-authored science blog, “The Intersection,” to Discover Blogs on Monday, and for this reason finding myself hailed by Columbia Journalism Review as part of a trend of mainstream media outlets (the dreaded “MSM”) acquiring science-centered blogs and blog content.

A recent cover feature in the magazine Nature by writer Geoff Brumfiel stirred all this up. “Supplanting the old media?” it reads. “Science journalism is in decline; science blogging is growing fast. But can the one replace the other?” In reply, Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Observatory” pointed out that Brumfiel and Nature might be constructing an artificial dichotomy. Brainard highlighted Discover’s burgeoning blog collection as an example of a marriage of old and new media in the science arena, and added: “next week the site will add another ‘top-ten’ blog from the Scienceblogs.com community.”

I don’t know about “top ten,” but that was us.

I feel very conflicted about all this. As both a science journalist and also a science blogger, I would be one messed up dude if I loathed either activity. Clearly there is no sharp dichotomy between blogging and journalism in the science field if the two merge in a person like myself, or in many others, like Carl Zimmer or Rebecca Skloot or Jennifer Ouellette.

Yet while I certainly enjoy blogging and feel it has many benefits—and we’re psyched to be at Discover—I actually side more with Nature and Brumfield than with Brainard in this dialogue. I don’t really see how blogging works as a substitute for traditional science journalism, and I question talk of “marriage” between the two when so many traditional science journalists are losing the jobs—and also, sad to say, when many science bloggers seem to have an adversarial stance toward their science journalist peers (and perhaps vice-versa).

So all the problems during this time of transition that Nature describes (and that many others have highlighted) resonate with me: Blogs have smaller, more specialized audiences. Most of the time, bloggers don’t have journalistic training and don’t “report.” And so on.

But there’s a deeper, and indeed, fundamental difference here that seems to me to have been elided, especially by Brainard. For the most part, blogging isn’t a career. As matters currently stand, most bloggers can’t expect to support a family, get health insurance, a retirement plan, etc, simply through blogging alone. At best they’re the equivalent of faculty adjuncts, never destined for the tenure track.

That’s why the science journalists who you find blogging tend to be freelance or unattached science journalists, and also book authors. We’re entrepreneurs and hacks of all trades; we do a whole bunch of different kinds of things; blogging is just one more to add on the pile. (And we’d be glad to take adjunct work too!)

In other words, our economic models are individualistic and entrepreneurial. One can scarcely doubt that there will always be people in the media willing—or crazy enough—to roll this way. We’re the types to to cry “Freedom!” at the top of our lungs while the media industry removes our entrails. But the question is, what happens to everybody else? The death of traditional science journalism is a death of pensions, healthcare, and childbearing leave. It is a harsh exposure of science journalism to the elements.

That’s why it was so beyond the pale to find a university faculty scientist and science blogger, University of Toronto biochemistry professor Larry Moran, commenting on my blog (quoted by Nature) that “Seriously, most of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be better of without it…Science journalists have let us down. I say good riddance.” In other words, send them out into the cold.

The deepest problem here, in my mind, is moral: We lack the shared sense that people who cover science in the media—blogger, reporter, or otherwise—are part of the same team and need to be supported in bad times. We rarely take the time to look out for each other. We lack a sense of solidarity.

And now, many of our friends are going down alone.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.

How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.” As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization are central scientific authorities that have long supported the idea of human-caused global warming, this was a particular shocker.

In essence, then, a number of Will’s claims—about “global cooling,” sea ice, and the WMO—were either flatly false or extraordinarily misleading, whether due to dishonesty, ignorance, or some combination of both. This wasn’t necessarily new for Will, any more than it is new for a number of other conservative columnists or pundits who write about global warming. But for some reason, the outrage this time built and fed upon itself. There’s no way to fully list all the things that have since been posted about the matter—the volume is far too great—but Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have kicked it off; Adam Siegel of EnergySmart has a very comprehensive overview; the folks at Media Matters and TalkingPointsMemo have driven the story; and Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room has not only written about the controversy in detail but gotten responses from the Post itself. In short, the paper takes the cowardly route and refuses to correct Will’s copious errors of fact, interpretation, and so forth. It equivocates. And it claims that Will’s column was fact-checked by multiple people “to the fullest extent possible.” (Ha.)

But enough blow-by-blow: What does it all mean?

Will is of course an eminence grise of Washington punditry, a regular on ABC’s This Week, and widely regarded as a distinguished conservative intellectual. He is also fatuously wrong about the science of global warming, and apparently impervious to and shielded from correction. Bloggers are now gleefully obliterating both him and the Washington Post, and they are substantively right in everything they’re saying-about climate science, about the stubborn inescapability of facts, and, indeed, about journalistic responsibility.

The Post thus takes a dramatic credibility hit here—and the bloggers a credibility gain—and given the current economic straits facing newspapers and the Post in particular, that’s something it can ill afford. We often hear that “technology” is what’s killing newspapers—innovations like Craig’s List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can’t even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

In this sense, I view the George Will affair with sadness. Sure, I share in the temporary glee of the bloggers. But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that bloggers will never replace. They’re extremely well-equipped to pounce and skewer a George Will column, but hardly well equipped to deliver an investigative or narrative feature story. We’re watching the media change before our eyes, the science media in particular—and no one can say, in light of episodes like the latest one involving George Will, that much of old media doesn’t in some sense “deserve” what’s happening to it now. Yet if our only sentiment is joy over the bloggers’ latest trophy, or outrage at the Post, we’re missing something deep indeed.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

CJR’s Observatory recently rounded up two useful discussions on the fragmenting state of science reporting in the United States.

Curtis Brainard tuned into the “Future of Science and Environmental Journalism” panel at the Wilson Center here in DC that explored the business-minded cuts that have diminished or eliminated science reporting staffs at mainstream news outlets. Though some cuts seems stranger than others; he notes that Aviation Week & Space Technology closed its Cape Canaveral office in the last year (NASA’s budget in FY2008 was $12.2 billion).

Cristine Russell reported on the more dire-sounding “Science Journalism in Crisis?” event at the AAAS conference, but she and Brainard both mention the migration of science journalism from major U.S. newspapers to niche online outlets. At AAAS, this phenomenon was coupled with an influx of foreign reporters:

The number of science reporters and journalists-in-training from far-flung parts of the world—the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, as well as Canada, the U.K., Germany, Sweden and other parts of Europe—has expanded at AAAS. At the same time, the presence of working American science reporters from major newspapers and magazines has declined over time, their ranks often replaced by a diverse group of freelancers and digital journalists who write, blog, and Twitter for a variety of startup and established news and information Web sites.

The Wilson Center event captured a slate of ideas for more citizen-centric science reporting that meets the local needs of individuals for environmental and technology news. Panelist Jan Scaffer, who directs the Knight Foundation-funded J-Lab at American University, is a champion of such “civic-media networks.” Inspired by her ideas, AU professor and science communication expert Matt Nisbet suggests in a recent column that the Obama administration should support collaborations between universities, museums, local media, and communities to produce and distribute science and environmental news.

The idea that nonprofit orgs may be the future of high-quality journalism in general is not new, but the suggestion that existing public media is a solid foundation on which to rebuild science journalism is worth considering, as any NOVA watcher or Science Friday listener can attest.

What do readers think the next iterations of effective science journalism will look like?

Image: flickr.com/mybloodyself

Since then, the economic woes have continued, and so has the slaughter in the science journalism field. A few weeks back we learned that the Weather Channel, owned by NBC Universal, owned by General Electric, killed its “Forecast Earth” program, which focused on climate change and featured the respected on-air climatologist Heidi Cullen (it is unclear if she is leaving the network entirely). This occurred in the context of a 10 percent workforce cut—many experienced meteorologists were also let go.

And now we learn that CNN, owned by Time Warner, has let go of its entire science, technology, and environmental unit, including Miles O’Brien, respected producer Peter Dykstra, and numerous others. O’Brien, a veteran reporter, was known for being tough on science issues—including holding accountable Senator James Inhofe, the leading Republican global warming denier and a veritable misinformation machine. A CNN spokeswoman said the network wanted to “integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit,” and observed that Anderson Cooper 360 will continue to cover our “Planet in Peril.” But the fact is that with fewer science journalism experts on hand, we can only expect to see less science coverage over all from CNN, and worse coverage when we do get it.

Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage.

Cable news was a tough place for science-related journalism even before the recession. In its 2008 “State of the News Media” survey, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 2007, cable news outlets gave science and the environment drastically short shrift. If you were to watch five hours of cable news, the report noted, you could expect to see 1 minute of science and technology coverage and 1 minute and 25 seconds of environmental coverage—compared with 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment content, 12 minutes of accidents and disasters, and “26 minutes or more” of crime.

But while cable news may carry less substantive science than some newspapers, let’s not forget that science coverage is struggling across the board. The pinnacle of newspaper science journalism is the hallowed Tuesday New York Times science section, but as Andrew Revkin of the Times notes at his blog DotEarth, “we (like everyone in print media) are doing ever more with less.”

Moreover, don’t be fooled when a CNN, or some other outlet, points to its “green” coverage in order to underscore a continuing science journalism commitment. Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage, any more than medical coverage or tech coverage are a substitute.

Science journalism should cover important developments in knowledge, where science is taking us, how science education and funding trends affect the competitiveness of the nation, science policy, and much else. Not only does science touch virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives—from health to economics to the Internet—but the federal government finances an enormous amount of research and development with taxpayer dollars. This year, that amount was more than $142 billion. Informed citizens deserve to understand more about what they’re getting from that investment. Medical, tech, and environmental coverage, though they may draw on science, rarely get into such areas.

Science journalism, at its best, should also be a vehicle for making ongoing advances in science relevant to non-scientist members of the public. Personalized medicine, designer babies, space militarization, geoengineering, brain-computer interfaces…how far away are such advances, and how will they affect people’s lives? Science journalism should put such questions on everyone’s radar, and then provide the best possible answers. It should help us forecast the future—and prepare us for it. Without such forward-looking journalism, we run a grave risk of not seeing what’s coming until it’s too late.

So what can we do? We have two options. We can continue to watch the economic contraction in the media business (witness the recent bankruptcy of newspaper giant Tribune Co.) destroy science coverage, and wring our hands whenever the latest dire news comes in. Or, we can take action to turn the tide.

For my part, I can say that the folks who created the ScienceDebate2008 organization are eyeing declining science coverage in the media and wondering how we might try to stick our thumbs in the dam. We’re convinced that disinterest from the press was one of the key reasons that we couldn’t get the candidates to commit to a live, televised science policy debate. Moreover, we know that while we’ve already lost a painful amount of science journalism, there is more yet that can be saved. However, it may require science defenders to actively raise money, whether by small donations over the Internet or bigger philanthropic ventures.

The CNN move last week did trigger considerable ire in the science blogosphere, so now may be the time to rally ourselves. My hope is to be able to write more, soon, about precisely how we can do so to greatest effect. In the meantime, I am very open to suggestions.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”