The scientific press, creator of public opinion
Gonzalo Herranz, department of Bioethics, University of Navarra, Spain
lecture delivered at the School of Institutional Social Communication of the Università della Santa Croce
Studymeeting on Communication and the Culture of Life
Rome, April 29, 1998.
2. From the dual structure of the "big six".
3. Strong links between the world of science and the world of communications.
Ethics of relations between scientific editors and the media.
5. Some proposals derived from the preceding considerations. Communication and culture of life
Scientific news is of great interest to today's men and women. The media know that many readers, especially the educated and the wealthy, that is, the most influential, are very interested in the advances that are so frequently and intensely produced in research laboratories. There is today a particular avidity for the novelties coming from the biomedical sciences, since it is not in vain that health is the most valued value in today's society. What is said at an international cardiology or cancer congress is followed with the same eagerness as a peace lecture , an economic alliance or a sporting event. More than 3,500 accredited journalists have covered the major world meetings that bring together AIDS scholars every year. In fact, worldwide, Dolly the sheep, transgenic soybeans or silicone breast prostheses can be as intense a media topic as the Champions League final, the Cuban embargo, the status the Middle East, or the price of oil.
The media deal with biomedical information in a very diverse way. There is a great variety of styles and ideologies. At one extreme, there are those that dedicate a fixed daily section, or an extensive program, or a weekly supplement: to this end, they have one or more professionals on their staff who are dedicated exclusively to science journalism, often with university Degrees in communication sciences and biomedical sciences. At the other extreme, there are the media that limit themselves to transcribing a few occasional news items, the most surprising or strange ones, contained in the abundant material they buy from news agencies or collaborations.
In general, it can be said that newspapers, radio and television devote a lot of space and time to these news items, treat them as qualified information, and not infrequently sensationalize them. They often rework and adapt them, adding comments and opinions obtained from experts, in order to give them more prominence, or to place them in their own cultural context. They also make them the subject of surveys among the public. Often, these reelaborations are less about making a cold demoscopic analysis than about adding fuel to the fire of social discussion .
The social media establishment knows that many biomedical news stories bring together a specific and very attractive mix of science and compassion, of intelligence and hope, which distinguishes them from others and makes them very human. They have the immediacy and realism of what concerns everyone's life and everyone's health. And, in addition, they often have far-reaching ethical implications that involve us all, as individuals and as a society.
In general, news about biomedical events and advances follow a process of generation, presentation and dissemination similar to that applied to any other news. But they have some special features. These are two closely connected events, but they have rarely been explicitly discussed.
The first fact concerns the sources of this information and can be stated as follows: the most culturally significant part, the truly opinion-forming part, of the biomedical news that is disseminated through the ordinary media originates in the pages of a few publications that, so to speak, act as a dominant world news agency on life and health sciences. To access this news, it is sufficient to examine every week average a dozen biomedical journals. I call them the "big six". They are: Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The British Medical Journal. The journalist in charge of the science and health section of newspapers and magazines does not have to move from his work desk: the express mail brings him these publications every week in their paper edition, or the Internet serves them to him in their electronic editions, or he receives them, along with many other materials, in any of the information packages or bulletins offered by some specialized agencies.
This is white-collar journalism, which coexists in the media with a very different kind of journalism, street journalism, with its energetic function of denouncing the inadequacies of the health care system, the incompetence of many doctors and the corruption of some scientists. This tabloid journalism requires the journalist to infiltrate laboratories, hospitals, morgues or doctors' offices. It is a more sensational journalism, but ultimately less influential. The journalism of scientific knowledge dissemination is more academic, more educational and penetrating, truly opinion-forming. It does not make the blood boil, but it does make the mind think. The influence of the six major journals is incalculable.
The second fact is this: the influence of these journals is based not so much on the strictly scientific data and perspectives they publish, but on the Philosophy and the project that inspires them. Although the six major journals differ markedly in history, structure and style, they nevertheless coincide in their purpose to create a social climate favorable to science. All of them intend to give scientific data, theories and models an inspirational, if not directive, role in collective and individual decision making. They are convinced that the scientistic vision of the world and of man is the only one capable of making us free and happy.
In general, the influence of these publications is not primarily and directly exerted on the general public. Their objectives are to inform academics and educators, politicians and financiers, public opinion makers and social development on such matters as science policy programming, research and technological development priorities, population and health policies, ecological guidelines, applications and uses of biotechnology, or the planning of health Economics . And, above all and shaping the whole, they define and disseminate the universal project of giving to the whole of humanity a scientific creed, a scientistic vision of man and human society as the foundation of a satisfactory way of life.
As expressed by F. J. Ayala, former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of Science magazine, the society of the future can be built only on the understanding of basic scientific concepts. Only in what Ayala calls scientific literacy is it possible to create the skilled labor force, the economic and health well-being of all, and the exercise of participatory democracy that will be both a requirement and a result of that society.
This literacy and catechesis of scientism is practiced week after week by these six journals in a slow but highly effective drip-drip irrigation that reaches the intellectual elites directly, and which the media take care of extending and amplifying. They do so not only because the big six constitute an important archive of data and scientific advances and because they are an important meeting point for science and society. This universal scientistic catechesis is operated with astonishing efficiency because the big six, in addition to being a source of news, are a source of commentary and interpretation of that same news.
Week after week, these news and comments are disseminated by all kinds of media. Little by little, the world is soaking up this message. In a thousand different ways, the message of the big six reaches, first, the scientific, political and economic elites, and then, through agencies and the media, it reaches everywhere, the common people. In the end, the written press, radio and television tell us in a thousand different ways that science will help us to live very well in this world, that it will give us the explanation for everything, that the salvation of humanity lies in science.
Suffice it to say that this is a general approach. In what follows, I will distribute the subject in four points. First, I will try to describe what we might call the dual structure of these influential publications. Second, I will describe how this dual structure allows the Big Six to serve as the main link between the scientific press and the media. Then, I will briefly refer to the ethical rules that have been arbitrated to avoid conflicts in the relationship between scientific publishers and the media. Fourth, I will conclude with some proposals that derive from the preceding considerations.
2. From the dual structure of the "big six".
The big six are journals that publish very diverse materials. In a fact worthy of accredited specialization that, in this time of subspecialism, the Big Six survive and flourish precisely because they are general journals: they cover all the natural sciences, or cover all of medicine. However, within this universality and diversity, the content of their articles can be divided into two well-characterized genres: the scientific genre and the opinionated genre. The first is represented by research or review articles, made of strong, hard, advanced science, accessible only to those trained in the subject. The second is made up of materials that are multiform in content and presentation, which seek precisely to evaluate and put into perspective the articles of the other section, to disseminate them, to make them accessible, giving them the form of news or commentary, weighing their significance for the future of scientific business , or taking the opportunity to gossip about people or institutions in the field. Sometimes, simply to amuse. Very often, to indoctrinate.
The six major journals enjoy, as scientific journals, a very high prestige. The articles they publish are at the forefront of research and scientific thought. They have a very high impact index, which means that the articles they publish are very frequently cited. They can afford to be extremely choosy in the selection of the material they publish, as they receive lots of selected manuscripts of original research , far more than they can publish. Only one article in ten or twenty of those submitted to them ever sees the light of day in their pages. They select them through a complex publishing house process, in which scientists of great authority participate, including some Nobel Prize winners, who contribute not only their opinion on the publishability or not of the manuscript, but also suggest measures to improve its scientific and textual quality.
Publishing a scientific article in one of the big six is the ideal to which many researchers and physicians secretly aspire, as it is a privilege achieved by few and universally considered as a mark of distinction in the curriculum vitae.
Logically, many of the most significant scientific discoveries of recent decades have come to light in the pages of the Big Six. The list would be endless, so a few samples will suffice: the molecular structure of DNA, the identification of AIDS as a new disease, the role of oncogenes in the determinism of cancer, the birth and development of the human genome project , the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and so many more.
The issue of subscribers to each of the six major journals is well over two hundred thousand. All of them appear not only in paper edition: their electronic texts, more or less complete, appear with exact punctuality on the Internet. They can be copied free of charge. There are no longer any delays due to mail malfunctions. This is in regard to its function as a transmitter of science.
But, as far as we are concerned this morning, the big six are, at the same time, powerful organs of opinion, enormously influential bodies. It is not unreasonable to think that their leadership in the field of science is exercised primarily not through their function as a very prestigious vehicle for the publication of class research , but through their opinion-making function. These few publications are the gray eminence that governs the world of science, that creates and guide public opinion in biomedicine, that inspires the ideology and policy of scientific research . They are, in fact, the vectors of the cultural influence of science.
They exercise this opinion-forming function in various ways. They do so, to begin with, indirectly, when they select the scientific articles they publish. Although the basic criterion here is the intrinsic scientific quality of the articles, their methodology, the originality of their approach, their revisionist and corrective nature, there is no doubt about one thing: when the supply of articles of excellent quality is so great, the selection may also be based on editorial criteria, preferences or interests, even on "journalistic" opportunity.
It is important to recognize that there is a real risk of biased publication. It is important because, in general, the public has an idealized view of science, which does not correspond to reality. People think that what scientific books and journals say is, if not the absolute truth, then the most objective possible description of the subject matter, as it is known at the historical moment in which the author writes. And he does not suspect that the reality may be otherwise: that in the presentation and assessment of science the author has a great influence, because he is inevitably linked to a certain way of seeing things, if not limited by conflicts of interest, more or less important, of an economic or ideological order. The reader must make an B to separate, through critical reading, between data and opinions, between scientific analysis and what we might call "cultural" adherences.
Scientific journals often make publishing house policy decisions. A journal may, for example, decide to take the lead in an important aspect: for example, in the study and discussion of the present and in the programming of the future of health care Economics . The immediate consequence of this is a change in the selection criteria of what it publishes: it is no longer the intrinsic merit of the articles themselves that decides their publication, but their congruence with the publishing house policy line. If this is done by one of the big six, a kind of change of priorities takes place. What used to occupy a peripheral place is now in everyone's visual focus. This is what, for example, the New England Journal of Medicine did during the period in which Arnold Relman governed its publishing house policy: the journal that, during the previous period, under Franz Ingelfinger, had assumed the leadership of medical ethics, became the activator of the critique of the economic structure of American medicine and the inducer of the economic analysis of health services. The Journal remained a harshly scientific journal, but its opinion section shifted the field of its main interest from ethics to Economics.
What, however, gives the big six that superior ability to influence public opinion about biomedicine is not primarily the many pages they devote to the publication of research articles. Their influence is due to their opinion pages, devoted to editorial articles, to letters from readers, to communicating and analyzing news from the scientific world, and to reinforcing the message of that news with commentary. The big six have been able to give their opinion pages a high technical quality, with breaking news, and a strong appeal, thanks to the combination of descriptive skill , academic humor, and fluency in discussion, which the science journalists who run these sections bring with their professional skill .
Opinion articles are varied in content and form. They are usually brief and full of verve. Some, such as editorials, commentaries and letters to the publisher , have the classic style that encourages opinion and discussion, similar to what is usually done in the general press. They are the means of expressing the freedom of thought and speech of editors and readers. But there are also news sections with brief and penetrating commentary. They are typically called News and Perspectives, News and Views, News and reviews. There is always someone in a hospital or a laboratory who reads them and enjoys communicating them in the corridors or elevators or while having a coffee during a work break.
3. Strong links between the world of science and the world of communications.
News, editorials and commentary are of interest not only to those working in hospitals and research laboratories. The opinion sections mentioned above and others published by the big six, such as Policy and People, Medicine and the average, Medicopolitical Digest, Headlines, Features, Dispatches, Updates, Lifeline, Minerva, are just the ones that can easily be passed on to the general media.
These few publications function as shuttles that transfer scientific information about life and health from the world of science to the open world of information. They are one of the important crossroads of the world, where scientific and worldly culture meet. But they are also, and for us very importantly, a crossroads where the culture of life and the culture of death have been clashing and will continue to clash endlessly.
The relationship between scientific publications and the media is intense and cordial. And, at the same time, complex.
These relationships are intense, abundant. A few data suffice to prove it. In a search in Bioethicsline of bibliographic material on Bioethics issues, collected between 1973 and December 1997, I have noted the issue of entries on Bioethics issues published in some American newspapers. The data are as follows: New York Times, 1930 entries; Washington Post, 653 entries; London Times, 122 entries; Newsweek, 112 entries; Wall Street Journal, 60 entries. It should be noted that there are very few primary articles, produced spontaneously by these newspapers. Almost all of these articles are secondary, i.e., commentaries on news published in the scientific press. If the search were made in the Medline bibliographic service, which covers all medical specialties, and not only Bioethics, as Bioethicsline does, the data would multiply considerably. The potential avidity of readers, listeners and viewers for life and health news is almost limitless. The general public is seen by the media as capable of being interested in everything, even if it is only with a superficial and fleeting interest.
Those who regularly browse through the big six note that in the science and health pages or supplements of newspapers and magazines, journalists often resort to the easy transcript of transcribing, sometimes literally, sometimes after a thorough reworking, the comments or news imported from those pages.
Each weekly issue of the big six carries, as we have seen, articles, news and commentary that can, in many different ways, attract media attention. I think the commentary that Richard Smith, publisher of the British Medical Journal, added to the electronic edition of the journal on 21 March last, just over a month ago, is very illustrative to this effect. (For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the references, both to the paper text and the electronic text, to other articles published in the same issue of the journal).
Smith said: "This week, the BMJ offers all sorts of possibilities [for the media]. Will the media report that carrying babies in airplanes can cause hypoxemia and even sudden infant death syndrome? This is aprovisional finding , questionable on ethical instructions (ref). A publishing house reports that British Airways has not recorded a single case of sudden infant death syndrome despite carrying 34 million passengers each year (ref). Perhaps someone could argue that this study should have been buried in a specialized journal to avoid creating unwarranted public concern. To that one can respond with these arguments: the public's right to know, the fact that there is no longer any place in the world to hide from the media, and the effort made by the BMJ to put this piece of research into context.
Another article that is likely to receive attention is the one that denounces the hypocrisy of supermarkets that promote themselves as suppliers of fresh and healthy food, while continuing to sell at advantageous prices cigarettes of "their own brand" (ref) [...] Such low-priced cigarettes are mostly bought by poor and elderly people, especially women, smokers with strong tobacco dependence: in other words, by those who can suffer the most harm.
The ethical discussion about whether a patient who has to stay in hospital for a long time should be allowed to take cannabis may provoke media attention, because in the survey conducted, some interviewees said that they prefer to be left alone to do what they like as long as they do not harm anyone else (ref).
One article that will almost certainly not attract media attention - despite, ironically, being methodologically very strong and containing an important message for everyone - is the one that demonstrates that it is inoperable to treat cough with antibiotics (ref).
Finally, two articles consider how messages flow in the opposite direction: from media to medicine. One describes how the Sunday Telegraph was manipulated by British American Tobacco into publishing that passive smoking does not cause cancer (ref), while another discusses how the media is calling into question the self-regulation of doctors (ref)."
As can be deduced from the general tone of Richard Smith's long and, I think, illustrative text, the relationship between the editors of scientific journals and the journalists who run the science and health sections of newspapers, radio or television stations tends to be friendly, collegial, because they need each other. They are forced to live in a somewhat symbiotic relationship: they share interests, if not common, then relatively close. Those who run the opinion pages of the Big Six are people who, on the one hand, have been able to gain, by academic training or by practical learning, an intense familiarity with the problems of science and with the art of communicating. They can understand complex problems of hard science or science policy and can then make those problems a precise and understandable presentation , engaging and absorbing, so that they can be assimilated and enjoyed by scientists and non-scientists alike, coming from very different human backgrounds and fields of interest. Science journalists are scientists and communicators at the same time. Their names-Gina Kolata, Barbara Culliton, Joseph Palca, Richard Smith, Trisha Greenhalgh, George Dunea, Carol Levine-have become as popular as those of the most famous scientists. And their influence, no doubt, may become greater.
I said before that the relationship between scientists and science journalists is friendly. And it is also influential in both directions. The information channels that link them support strong traffic in both directions. One can imagine that the movement of science news goes predominantly, if not exclusively, from science journals to the media. But it should be made clear that there is also a reverse flow: not as dense and abundant, but just as real and effective.
From the media and, through them, from public opinion itself, frequent messages are sent to scientists. In the first place, because they are people in the street and behave as such. In parenthesis, almost all of them like to appear in the newspapers, talk on the radio or appear on the news or on special television programs. Moreover, scientific research , in order to receive from society the much money it needs, needs to enjoy credit with the public and with those in power, and it depends to a large extent on the mass media to achieve this. It does not harm researchers, on the contrary, when it comes to seeking money for their research, to be well known, to enjoy a good image, to be well liked by the media. It is no good for the researcher today to shut himself up in an ivory tower. The combination of scientific press + media can open many doors and win over many people.
But there is more. The academic community itself is incredibly sensitive to scientific knowledge dissemination . The way research is done is influenced by what the media says. In 1991, Phillips, Kanter, Bernarczyk and Tastad published agraduate article Importance of the lay press in the transmission of medical knowledge to the scientific community (N Engl J Med 1991;3251180-3), an article that attempted to answer a very interesting and bold question: does the fact that certain medical research is disseminated by the popular media have any effect on the academic community or on the group that produced it? The authors started from the idea that the rapid and accurate communication of the results of biomedical research is of interest to the public and, logically, to the authors of this research, who see their names and observations popularized. But is it also of interest to the academic community in general, and is it sensitive to the scientific content disseminated by the media? In other words, does the media, that fourth power, influence the people who do science?
The simplest way to measure this is to see whether scientific papers that find an echo in the important social media are later cited more in scientific publications than those that do not find such an echo. Phillips and his collaborators did this by comparing, with the financial aid of the Citation Index, the citations received by a set of articles of similar content and quality, all published in the New England Journal of Medicine, according to whether or not they had been commented on in the New York Times. They observed by means of a rigorous methodology and the unexpected financial aid of unplanned circumstances, that the articles published in the scientific journal and then commented on in the newspaper received a much higher issue of citations in scientific articles published over the following 10 years, especially in the first year. They concluded that research that is covered by the general press has an amplifying effect on the transmission of that research to the research community itself. That is, scientific researchers are informed and educated, as scientific researchers, by the general press.
This is a very interesting finding , which places formidable responsibilities and opportunities on the shoulders of the disseminators.
Ethics of relations between scientific editors and the media.
Between scientific publications and the media, there are logically very different situations: there is usually a great deal of room for partnership and synergistic work . But there are also occasions of disagreement and contradiction.
Let's start with cooperative relationships. In general, the big six are carefully scrutinized by science journalists for news that might be of interest to the general public.
This entails not only a task of transmission, but especially of reinterpretation, which is time-consuming, since it is not only a matter of giving journalistic and politically correct form to what is published in scientific journals: explanations and expert opinions must be obtained, since it is often not enough to rely on the editorials with which the journal itself accompanies the most important articles it publishes.
It is therefore necessary for the media to receive the text of these articles in advance, in order to be able to prepare the corresponding comments and criticisms. To facilitate this work for journalists, editors usually provide the media in advance with the text of all research or opinion articles to be published in the immediate future, or at least the text of those articles that are likely to arouse the interest of the media and the public. This early submission of as yet unpublished information is a common feature of the big six and is linked to an embargo condition: journalists undertake not to publish these comments and criticisms before a preset time, which is usually a few hours after the scientific journal is sent to subscribers.
The ethical commitment of the embargo is complemented and strengthened by another ethical rule , known as the Ingelfinger rule, in honor of the former publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, who imposed it as a condition for the acceptance of papers for publication in his journal. Ingelfinger established his rule in 1969 to protect, vis-à-vis authors, the right of journals to publish original material. The Ingelfinger rule establishes a covenant with authors: that the papers they submit for publication are understood to be original, i.e., they have not been previously published, have not been submitted simultaneously to another publisher for publication, and have not been submitted to the media for parallel knowledge dissemination .
It has been said that the embargo and the Ingelfinger rule are an attack on freedom of expression, that they subject authors to the capricious will of scientific editors, that they harm the public's right to know the truth without interference from third parties, that they delay sometimes by several months the publication of information that could be life-saving.
But there is no doubt that these established standards have a very positive balance in their favor: they serve to eliminate haste, irresponsible and sensationalist publication and, above all, financial aid to organize, interpret and contrast information. Information is of better quality when these standards are met. They can be suspended, in exceptional cases, when they could have unfavorable implications for some patients or for the public. But this happens very rarely.
These ethical standards favor the creation of a cordial, cooperative atmosphere between the scientific press and the media. Science, for example, is enthusiastic about its relations with the media. The journal has made it one of its goals to help the public achieve a serious and competent understanding of science and is committed to maintaining a fruitful and friendly relationship with the public through the media. To the media it offers a weekly information package (known as SCIPACK) that is sent by e-mail to journalists who request it. The SCIPACK is also available on the Eurekalert website, along with many press services of academic institutions and major biomedical journals. The SCIPACK consists of abstracts of research papers to be published the following week in Science, and includes contact information for the authors. The big six have adopted the internship of posting abstracts or the full text of articles to appear the following week on their websites in advance.
Under the consensus created by the embargo and Ingelfinger standards, other ethical criteria have been developed to facilitate relations between scientific editors and the media. The desire for priority, to be the first to publish the news, has been tempered. The center of gravity of good scientific journalism has shifted to the quality and maturity of the comments. Exaggeration of content or torture of data is considered bad internship . The journalist who exaggerates the truth, who willfully distorts, may achieve a transitory popularity among the public, but endangers his prestige in the eyes of his colleagues. It is no longer acceptable with impunity to present the tentative as accomplished, the promising as real. Science journalists prefer to give their messages a positive but measured air: they do not like to talk about failed research or negative trials. They prefer to talk about new hopes.
The battle in favor of the ethics of objective information is, however, very difficult: in the world of science it is not admitted that objective ethics exist, and even less that a religiously based ethics is acceptable. The ethics of committees, of minimum consensus, of permanent doubt, is preferred. A moratorium on undertaking certain research may be accepted, but in science it is considered simply absurd to speak of moral absolutes. Scientists feel more at ease in a kind of childish moral innocence.
5. Some proposals derived from the preceding considerations. Communication and culture of life
Everything I have said so far is intended to prepare us for a decisive question: in the context that brings us together, Communication and the culture of life, what can we do? At the decisive crossroads, where scientific information must become public opinion, how can we incorporate all the wealth of biomedical science into the culture of life?
I think that this fundamental work must be done by fulfilling the threefold mandate that the Holy Father has given to the evangelizers of life: announcing, celebrating and serving the Gospel of Life.
The news and comments brought to us each week by the big six should be evaluated in the light of the Gospel. Many times, they bring us good news, which will lead us to announce them, celebrating them with joy, proposing them as a service to all, especially to the weakest in health and the poorest in power. Scientific business has an extraordinary power of progress, of doing good, of overcoming illness and alleviating pain. Scientific business also has, along with an amusing capacity to get into blind alleys and to make surprising mistakes, an unlimited capacity to rectify the error, an acute and good-humored sense of starting over after each failure. These human virtues of scientists give us a great capacity to understand them, to dialogue with them on a one-to-one basis, to give a positive, sometimes even enthusiastic, view of scientific progress.
But many other times, the news will not provoke joy, but pain. They will be loaded with scientistic, manipulative ideology: they will treat certain human beings, especially the smallest and weakest, as if they were things; they will reduce their soul to a self-regulating and predictable cybersystem; the human body is no longer the temple of a soul, but a set of interacting molecular systems capable of being described according to physical models. When it comes to discerning what is noble in many news items, we must first eliminate a whole wrapper of scientistic interpretations, which are presented, admittedly, with consummate skill . Our colleagues of the Big Six are not only professionals of great skill: they are also apostles of a doctrine that they preach with a perseverance that we Christians so often lack. Once again, it turns out that the children of darkness are more skilled than the children of light.
Almost everyone has been led to believe that we are witnessing, thanks to science, a revolution with greater consequences for the way people live than the coming of Christ, the French Revolution or the Fall of the Wall. Thanks to science, we are told, there will be no more political revolutions: social welfare and economic progress will be achieved in the future thanks to biotechnology, which will give bread and health to all. They insist again and again that science will not only change our living conditions: it will change our way of seeing the world, nature, man.
The message to be debated is a mixture of true science and utopian ideology. Now, we are told, with molecular biology and the new Genetics, we have for the first time a congruent picture of the biological world. Nature is presented as a system of systems. Organisms function and reproduce as systems governed by their own genes. They are complex Structures managed by the program contained in their genomic DNA. Biological life is being interpreted as the processing of specific information. A cloned embryo is as valid as a biparental embryo obtained by sexed reproduction. Concepts borrowed from computer science, systems science, programming and control engineering, present to us in logical diagrams the control of all organic functions. It will not be long before the neurosciences will offer us the molecular mechanism of thought. There will no longer be mystery, but knowledge of programmed systems. Everything will be reprogrammable.
In the face of this, what are we doing? The Pope never tires of giving us strong ideas.
I do not want to be pessimistic, but we must recognize that at times we have not lived up to what the Pope expects of us. In point 45 of Dominum et Vivificantem the Holy Father tells us these words that come here like a ring to the finger: "The Spirit of Truth, who 'convinces the world concerning sin', meets with that fatigue of the human conscience, ... which also determines the paths of human conversions". To refute scientism, to cleanse science of intellectual arrogance, of political arrogance, is a task that demands work and fatigue, a courageous heart and a courageous intellectual effort.
Before moving on, an aside: how strangely harshly the Pope has been treated by some of the big six! Their response has often been a cold and calculated silence in the face of documents of extraordinary human richness, carrying messages that touch the heart of science. Not a word about point 16 of Redemptor hominis, that sort of ethical statute of scientific progress. And instead, frivolously fierce criticisms, of alarming ethical simplism, about Evangelium vitae. And when the Pope had the unparalleled moral courage to publish the document on evolutionism or on Galileo, the response in some of the six was one of derision, of outrage, asking for more humility, more self-accusation. No one spoke of the exemplary moral fatigue of the Holy Father.
We good sons and daughters must stand up for the Holy Father. The editors of the big six do not lack a sense of professionalism: they publish the letters sent to them by readers, even if they strongly contradict their own opinions, if they have human quality, reasonableness, coherence and, ideally, a touch of humor. Their columns are, in principle, open to us. Even to publish the critique that, from faith and true humanity, we can make of the secularist project that they propose.
We must return to hope. The media have the gigantic task of carrying out this Christian catechesis of science. I believe that it has fallen to us to repeat in our time the enormous task that those first Christians who were the leaven of the world did in the second century.
Christian newspapers must have a science section that is not a mimetic repetition of sensationalism or scientistic messages. They must have the strength of that fatigue of conscience. Because here it is once again true that battles are won by tired soldiers.
It is "in the fatigue of the human heart and in the fatigue of conscience that 'metanoia'," conversion, takes place. This message of John Paul II is not only a staff message: it is addressed to those of us who must participate in the battle to conquer science for Christ.
This meeting is an occasion for hope. We need a competent scientific journalism, with a gift for languages, dialectic skill and a happy ability to communicate, where the Good News is told with joy. We must lose our fear of scientistic journalism. Do not be afraid! The cry that inaugurated the Pontificate of John Paul II is enormously inspiring. We cannot limit ourselves to condemnation: we must dazzle with the joy of the Gospel of life, with the splendor of truth.
We must go around the world saying: There is only one urgent need: that scientists and poets expose themselves to the Truth of Christ!