Neuron Culture

Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question — and to do investigative reporting — I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science — the search for empircal answers to important, testable questions — is an extremely worthy endeavor. But that endeavor is always in danger of being compromised by both the inevitable conflicting interests that every scientist has (which range from pride, allegiance to ideas, ambition, money on or under the table) and by broad cultural forces that frame both the questions asked and the reading of the evidence the asking generates. As in politics, these human and cultural forces often push even the most well-intentioned efforts off track — and the unprincipled into big trouble. Find an example, judiciously dig, lucidly write, and — if you’re lucky — publish, and you’ve got investigative science journalism.
To see what such looks like when applied, consider my own article and blog posts on the PTSD Wars, Philip Dawdy’s tireless watchdogging of the pharma industry; or, if you’ve a taste for longer work, Horace Freeland Judson’s “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science.” (Judson’s book is really history, but brings the peel-the-onion spirit of investigative journalism to bear, and draws on many good examples of investigative journalism as well.) Other examples an approaches out there; these just leap readily to mind.
I find it odd that these or other examples, particularly in coverage of pharma by the several bloggers and reporters who do that well, didn’t spring immediately to the minds of people pondering what investigative science journalism looked like. The discussions at Ed’s and other blogs on this tended to focus on how to do investigative reporting of discoveries or results. Discoveries are the tip. Sometimes the ice beneath is good. Sometimes it’s rotten — or the whole thing is just styrofoam, patched together or even elaborately faked to buttress up an unsupported argument.
That said, I don’t see why a given writer can’t be both watchdog and, if not “cheerleader,” then a judicious but enthusiastic explainer. Why shouldn’t good science be admired? No reason you can’t do that — while calling bullshit when you see things done otherwise.

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