Improving the engagement of scientists with the media

ABSTRACT

Only if one ventures to report on other academic turf does one truly come to appreciate with what extraordinary generosity, patience, and clarity scientists typically share their expert advice. In Beyond the Hype The Inside Story of Science's Biggest Media Controversies, Fox describes how some of these episodes played out during the SMC's existence, including animal research, genetically modified organisms, human–animal chimeras, the “climategate” furore, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, and, inevitably, the COVID-19 pandemic. Fox did a splendid job of persuading scientists that only by coming forward to explain what animal testing for research really entailed and what motivated it, rather than leaving the stage clear for the misinformation of extremists, could public opinion be shifted and such research normalised (as well as soberly debated). [...]Fox relates the saga of the neuropharmacologist David Nutt, Chair of the UK Government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs from 1998 to 2009, who was sacked by the then Labour Government because of his politically inconvenient views on the relative harmfulness of different classes of drugs.