CONTROLLED EXPLOSION PACKAGE PROVES HARMLESS
CHOCOLATE IS THE NEW HEALTH FOOD
ASTRONOMERS ARGUE OVER NEW PLANET
Do these headlines seem familiar? Have you ever stopped to think about what they really mean? Or do you just glance at the story and turn the page of the paper? Have you ever wanted to find out exactly how you control an explosion? If chocolate is really good for you? Or even what makes a planet a planet? We did, and this is how we came to start up This Week – the science behind the news. It began as part of the Guardian’s Life supplement, launched by Emily Wilson and carried on by me, and swiftly became one of its most popular columns, surviving Life to become part of the paper’s main news section. And the reason for its success? It answers those nagging questions that lurk behind every news story but rarely make it into the paper.
At one level it is serious stuff. Politicians may claim that the only solution to the energy crisis is to go nuclear, but what exactly are the risks, and can we be sure that new nuclear power stations will deal with them? Every few months there seems to be new superbug set to cause a pandemic, but what is the real threat, and can we protect ourselves if we need to? At the other end, when a royal is forced to take her dog to a pet psychologist, don’t you want to know what they actually do there?
Despite the scientific community’s obsession with communication, there is a lot of bad, sensationalist science reporting in the UK media. ‘Miracle cures’ and ‘startling new developments’ are miraculously and startlingly frequent. You need a bit of background knowledge to untangle the ends of a story, and This Week is part of the attempt to provide that.
Yet all of the articles have their own existence, independent of the story which inspired them. At the time the pieces were commissioned and written, we treated them like news stories, and although they may seem short, enormous amounts of real reporting by the Guardian’s science team went into them every week.
We agonised over the currency of the pieces and the issues – would they stand up or just seem dated by the time the Life section came out? ‘Do books improve your mind?’ was written about a celebrity who had never read a book but was writing an autobiography. ‘Can acupuncture help you to beat cocaine addiction?’ was written as model Kate Moss struggled with the drug.
But current as the pieces were designed to be, most of them live beyond the week they were published. I will always be fascinated by what happens if you drill a hole in your head or how many vaccinations a baby can have.
These are the big questions of life. And the little ones too.
Simon Rogers