What Every Journalist Should Know About Science

It's not just science reporters who need to evaluate research and learn to tell good studies from bad

A condition called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is—or is not—a precursor of breast cancer. It does—or does not—require treatment. Doctors differ on these questions because definitive scientific evidence doesn't exist. Some women with DCIS, a collection of abnormal cells in the milk ducts of the breast, choose to have a mastectomy. Some a lumpectomy and radiation. A few watch and wait.

So when a study addressing this issue appeared in JAMA Oncology last August, it drew widely divergent coverage. Gina Kolata at The New York Times wrote that DCIS posed little or no risk: "Patients with this condition had close to the same likelihood of dying of breast cancer as women in the general population." Alice Park in Time came to a different conclusion: "DCIS may not be as benign as doctors once thought." And Jennifer Calfas at USA Today cited dueling experts, drawing no conclusion at all. The study, she wrote, "sparked a debate on the importance of treatment options for women diagnosed with the earliest stage of breast cancer"—if, in fact, DCIS is an early stage of breast cancer.

Confused? The study, as well as comments from lead researcher Steven A. Narod and his hospital, was confusing, too. Narod, of Women's College Research Institute at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, told Kolata at the Times that after a biopsy to remove the abnormal cells, "the best way to treat DCIS is to do nothing." Yet the hospital's press release quotes Narod as saying that DCIS "has more in common with small invasive cancers than previously thought" and "there's an inherent potential for DCIS to spread to other organs." In fact, nothing in the study supports the broad assertions made in many stories. And few stories focused on the clearest findings: Age and ethnicity are risks.

Coverage of the DCIS study highlights what is perhaps the biggest challenge facing today's science journalists: Evaluating and interpreting complex and sometimes contradictory results at a time when so many news stories—from climate change and health reform to energy and environmental regulation to political polling and economics—rely on a fairly sophisticated understanding of science. That makes journalism's role in developing public science literacy more crucial than ever. "We need a science-literate world because, as science and technology change the environment we live in, we need to understand how we can be smart in navigating those changes," says Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, and publisher of Undark, a new science magazine based there. "How do we do that if we don't understand how it works?"

That was part of the challenge posed by the DCIS story. Even science writers who specialize in medical coverage—or, more narrowly, cancer coverage, or even breast cancer coverage—had trouble navigating the subject. And few science writers have the luxury of such narrow beats. Most cover multiple fields, writing about a NASA experiment one day and a toxic waste controversy the next. Yet they must quickly and accurately translate the science behind these stories, while also being wary of mistakes and fabrications.

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