More than five years ago, Wired ran the first of those now-common, long magazine features–the ones that were part-technical reporting on the construction of the mammoth particle accelerator, part-starry eyed navel gazing at what finding the Higgs boson would mean, part glossy spread of surprisingly colorful scientific instrumentation. The other publications followed suit: Seed in 2006; The New York Times and Discover in 2007; and then Scientific American, Technology Review and Popular Science, all of which managed to hold onto their excitement until 2008. (PopSci even managed to peg its piece to the champagne-soaked affair to christen the machine in September, which reportedly a billion people watched around the world.)

It’s been nearly a year. Any sight of the Higgs? No. SciAm called it “the discovery machine”–what’s it discovered? That its wiring is janky.

In fact, the most recent reports out of CERN are that the LHC won’t even be running at full capacity at the end of 2010 thanks to a bunch of suspect electrical splices, one of which shorted last year little more than a week after its start up and destroyed several of the accelerator’s humongous magnets. Patience is running low in the physics community. Among curious spectators, like me, it’s evaporated. I’d suspect that for more casual observers, the LHC rings as many bells as the name of the Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election. (It was Admiral James Stockdale, if you’re curious.) From a media standpoint, this promising machine has been moving toward its potential for so long that The New Scientist has taken several opportunities to ask whether it will create a black hole that sucks in our world, refute that claim, restate it in a slightly different way and refute it again.

I’m not trying to discount the mammoth efforts that have gone into the design and creation of a machine that will attempt to recreate the initial conditions immediately after the Big Bang. It’s an awesome feat and surely will require years to get all its kinks smoothed out. But, my anticipation is wearing thin. Seed’s story on the LHC (from way back in ’06) referred to the more than 15-year effort as “discovery for discovery’s sake.” And that’s sort of why I’ve lost interest. If the Higgs boson eventually is found, a very small, elite group of people’s lives will change. If it renders a victor in the war between string theory and loop quantum gravity, the winning side’s ticker tape parade will likely not be televised. Proving the Standard Model will not reverse the creep of climate change. It will not eradicate Ebola or AIDS or any other disease that plagues humanity. And it will not help us figure out how autism and other brain disorders manifest.

Don’t get me wrong. It will be really fucking cool. And it may usher in a new love of science, much as the moon landing of 40 years ago did. (Fingers crossed.) But, materially, it won’t change a thing.

Which interestingly makes Wired’s original angle on the LHC the most poignant. After noting that several billions of dollars were being spent “to find one lousy subatomic particle,” the 2004 piece says:

Discovering the Higgs might seem an esoteric goal. But the search will have a powerful real-world spinoff: to process all that data, scientists are building a worldwide meta-network of PCs, organized into large clusters and linked by ultra high-speed connections into a global, virtual computing service. It’s called the LHC Computing Grid, and it could mark the evolution of the Internet from a pervasive communications network into a powerful, global computation network.

Okay, I lied. The LHC will materially change the world: we’ll get faster access to porn.

Art Credit: Photo by µµ

If coverage in the mainstream media is any indication, the answer is “yes.” The AP reported in April that the Obama administration was open to talk about such schemes. A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist reported that the American Meteorological Society had become “the first major scientific body to officially endorse research into geoengineering.” (Reports from both the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society are forthcoming.) In today’s Science Times, John Tierney describes geoengineering as an alternative to policy-based talks, like those of the G8, where several nations make promises, collectively welch on them and then re-congregate a years later to set new goals that no one intends to reach.

If rich European countries with strong green constituencies cannot live up to their own promises to cut carbon, how much hope is there of permanently enforcing tough restrictions in the United States, much less in poor countries like India and China? … By contrast, climate engineering does not require unanimous agreement or steadfast enforcement throughout the world. Instead of relying on politicians’ promises, we might find it simpler to deal directly with Mother Earth’s hot air.

His column seems to at least encourage research into the schemes, but as one of his subjects points out: the smaller the research effort, the longer time period is needed to ascertain its effects. So, we pretty much have to go big or go home.

The take stands in stark contrast to what ran in in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. Graeme Wood’s treatment of the interventions conveyed a mad science-type sentiment about the relative simplicity and cheapness of these solutions. It fervently warned that these technologies would have such a low threshold to implement that a renegade millionaire, he singles out Richard Branson, could take the earth’s climate into his own hands.

This could be ruinous, both because of unexpected effects and because–as was shown in a 2007 study that I reported on for Scientific American–these efforts will only serve to hold climate change at bay. If one of these schemes is undertaken and then paused or stopped, it would be like ending a course of Propecia for preventative hair-loss: just as your hair will quickly abate to its natural state (you with considerably less of it), the effects of climate change will take hold in fast-forward.

The one place where Tierny and Wood seem to agree: Geoengineering could end up as our only option.

But, yesterday, he wandered into my territory. While discussing the so-called “birthers” with Chris Matthews on the show “Hardball,” Buchanan stated that the birthers’ misbegotten notion that Barack Obama is not a native-born citizen of the U.S. (and thus has no legitimate claim to its presidency) is akin to Al Gore’s support of global warming. He called  the process of global warming itself “a hoax” and “a power transfer to governments here, and governments abroad.”

Emily Gertz over at change.org has the full transcript.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWcER2ow6fQ

(Fox News and MSNBC are supposedly not attacking one another’s talking heads anymore, so I guess MSNBC asked Buchanan to ratchet up the crazy a bit--just to keep things lively.)

The sad thing: Moments earlier he impugned Matthews for lavishing attention on the birther movement, saying he was keeping the story alive and giving those conspiracy theorists exactly what they want. Then he had to go and ruin it. Ugh!

Well, are they? The answer is probably, yes. Scientists don’t freely offer easy-to-digest sound bites on their work, and are sometimes media shy to the point of just not wanting to talk about it at all. Most have the technical expertise and innovation down, but not the marketing. (Mooney, on the other hand, is quite good at promoting his work–and this Internet battle probably won’t hurt sales of he and Kirshenbaum’s book.) Instead of debating the finer points of that argument, Myers favored invective and finger-pointing after he happened upon a chapter in Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book where he (along with fellow new-atheist Richard Dawkins) is called out specifically as part of the problem.

I think I could safely characterize Myers, who maintains the popular, often-rollicking Pharyngula blog (which he parlayed into a column in SEED magazine), as more or less dismissive of religion and religious people. Mooney and Kirshenbaum assert that it’s not just being dismissive of religion but antagonistic, adversarial and cruel to those who practice a faith.

What followed is a point-counterpoint that includes the disturbing desecration of a communion wafer, the migration of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s blog The Intersection from the SEED-operated Scienceblogs to Discover, Myers accusing the “Unscientific America” authors of “bigotry” and his damning conclusion: that the book “utterly useless.” I could give you the play-by-play, but you can read it yourself. (Here is Myers’ side; and here’s Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s.)

Just a note on where I fall here: I enjoy hearing Dawkins and Myers pontificate, but I also take much of what they say as entertainment. They are willfully provocative both in thinking and expression. In political terms, their role would be to galvanize the base–those of us who are sold on science, a big-tented organization of which Mooney and Kirshenbaum are card-carrying members. Dawkins and Myers, however, are not who we science-evangelists would trot out to try to persuade people to take a second look at the scientific evidence regarding evolution, vaccines and autism, climate change or any of the other subjects that have migrated into the culture wars. Would the Dems dispatch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to sell universal healthcare? Frankly, they just wouldn’t have the patience required for the task. Hell, since he penned “The Republican War on Science,” I don’t know if Mooney could fill that role.

Who’s left then? Obama’s nominee to take over the NIH, Francis Collins, who lead the Human Genome Project and is an evangelical Christian? Needless to say, Mooney’s for him and Myers is less enthused.

The part of the package I am enamored with is a narrative on covering the event by John Noble Wilford, the Times writer who wrote the story that headlined “Men Land On Moon” on the July 21, 1969 edition of the paper. It’s a great piece of media inside-baseball that shows some elements of process, as well as captures a snapshot of science and science journalism 40 years ago. Wilford tells the tale of a bygone era that is both romantic and inconceivable amidst today’s blogs, shoestring reporting budgets and massive layoffs.

He describes arriving at Cape Kennedy and spreading out his stuff and hooking up the TVs and phones in the Times trailer. He notes the contingency plan he devised of noting every event in the system check and countdown to launch, so he’d still have a story, in case the Apollo didn’t take off that day. He recalls a bout of insomnia spent anticipating what he would write about the landing the night of July 19.

I think of what I will write. I have never made a practice of composing a draft story in anticipation of a success, or alternative drafts for failure. I trust myself to draw inspiration from what happens, thinking spontaneity will serve me better and endow the story with the energy of immediacy. But now, phrases and disconnected sentences spill out of my wakefulness.

I get up and read the articles I have written about the mission up to now. Reporters may feel impelled to write of the next day’s events as the culmination of the space race, the achievement of an ambitious national goal, a historic triumph. I swear to myself that I will not use “historic” in my top paragraph.

Elsewhere, he notes that if Capt. Cook and Christopher Columbus were alive then, they’d be more impressed by the “instantaneous telecommunication” than the fact that there were guys on the moon. It’s an interesting thought, especially since the improvement of that technology and the democratization of the media has eliminated the type of stories that Wilford wrote about the Apollo missions. Sure, people are still covering space flight (at least until the space shuttle is decommissioned next year), but for the most part its resource-intensive services, like the wires. Collectors item headlines like “Men Land On Moon” are harder to look forward to since the news has been picked apart and put back together between when the event happens and the presses roll. These days, only the election of Barack Obama or the victory of a sports team would prompt a TV anchor to show the front page of a paper on the air–as Walter Cronkite did with Wilford’s story.

This was an event–and probably the only one in the last 50 years–where science got as big of a spotlight as politics or sports. According to a recent “Nature” article, the event occurred at a time when science journalism was changing from boosterism to bullshit detecting, a transition hinted at by Wilford when he describes the postmission news conference: “William Hines, a reporter given to puncturing balloons, interrupts the self-congratulatory rhetoric with a question for Chris Kraft, chief of flight operations: ‘Chris, how do you know this was not just a random success?’”

Today, scientists are no longer heroes–like some politicians and most sports stars–but boffins toiling off the stage. That’s in part because science journalists aren’t feeding their mythologies, but rather–and, frankly, more appropriately–are looking for myths to bust. Journalism itself, meanwhile, has turned leaner and meaner and higher throughput. A lot has changed in 40 years.

Art Credit: Photo by Kevin Collins.

This is interesting for two reasons: 1) Most methods to intervene with life’s natural course require getting started early. 2) The one thing that unites science enthusiasts and people who took “physics for poets” in college is life-extension. (Well, pandemics do, as well.)

Still, I am not sure if this piece of science was worth any of the hubbub.

There are two reasons for this, as well: 1) This happened in mice, so unless you have a pet rodent (obligatory zeitgeist reference: R.I.P. Ben, the late-Michael Jackson’s pet rat), no one you know is getting a new lease on life. 2) Rapamycin has another use: It shuts down the immune systems of transplant patients to avoid tissue rejection.

I’ll let Nicholas Wade of The New York Times deliver the obvious disclaimer: “Experts warn that this should not be tried at home. No one knows yet if rapamycin slows aging in people or at what dose it might be effective. And any drug that suppresses the immune system is not to be trifled with.”

That little caveat didn’t stop the U.K.’s Daily Express from claiming this “new pill” could add 20 years to your life (complete with a picture of an attractive woman getting ready to throw a Mento down her gullet–albeit sensually). As Nature’s own The Great Beyond blog notes, another Brit pub, The Daily Mail, didn’t get around to mentioning that the life-elongating effects happened only in mice until the 20th paragraph. (So much for the inverse pyramid.) With that sort of selective recall, it’s no wonder that U.K. science journalists are much more sanguine about the state of the field than their American counterparts.

Last week, there was a conference of science journalists in London where there was a lot of invective about the herd mentality, me-too stories and the press release-greased gears of science reporting in the Internet age. The rapamycin study is a great example of a ubiquitous story that has no legs. Reporting it will likely have no effect on readership other than to mislead them into taking a drug that would make them mortally susceptible to the common cold.

I wonder if the new rule for deciding whether to report a story should be: If you have to lead with a giant caveat, maybe the science isn’t quite ready for prime time.

(Disclaimer: I should admit that I have written at least one story about the possible, magical powers of rapamycin–though in the case of the reversal of an autism spectrum disorder and also with a clear mention that it was done in mice in the headline.)

The piece fails to venture out of greater scientific community, which long ago ruled that vaccines did not cause autism. After stating that “vaccines skepticism-not the vaccines themselves-is now looking like the true public-health threat,” Mooney doesn’t talk to a single staunch member of the skepticism community. The only parent of an autistic child who is quoted in the piece is George Washington University microbiologist Peter Hotez, who also happens to be president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute. The sole advocate for the autism community is David Kirby, who chronicled the autism activist organization SafeMinds in his book “Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy.”

What is substituted in favor of a voice of dissent are interpretations of the anti-vaccine movement by science writers who suddenly find themselves being pressed into punditry. For instance, Arthur Allen, author of the book “Vaccine: the Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver” and of a 2002 piece in the New York Times Magazine about the mercury preservative thimerosal and its disputed link to autism, speculates on why the anti-vaccine movement persists in the face of science’s conclusion. It’s like having Katrina vanden Heuvel attempt to get inside Sarah Palin’s head and figure out why the latter apparently quit politics.

Elsewhere, Dr. David Gorski, better known as Orac in the science blogosphere, muses that high-profile vaccine haters, like Jenny McCarthy, have amended their tune to harangue the number of vaccines administered at one time in response to the science clearing the MMR jab. I can attest that Gorski, who pontificates and riffs at the entertaining Respectful Insolence on the Scienceblogs network (where Mooney’s Intersection blog resided until he recently moved it to Discover), definitely keeps up with this debate. He is, however, a breast cancer surgeon at Wayne State University Medical School. Without getting into the journalist vs. blogger debate, I’m unsure why a cancer specialist is quoted in an article about autism? Because he was willing to make the point Mooney needed?

In a story on such a contentious issue, I think you need to have the courtesy of including at least one voice from the other side–even if its only for a paragraph. If you don’t want to go to members of the anti-vaccine lobby–and trust me, they are not hard to find–why not at least go to pediatricians, who are on the front lines of the war and might be able to better guess at a parent’s motivation?

Mooney’s done a lot of great work on behalf of science by trying to shed light on subjects from the Republican party’s shunning of scientific findings to the developing connection between global warming and hurricanes. But, by keeping one half of the vaccine and autism debate completely in the dark, this Discover piece really doesn’t help anyone.

Art Credit: Photo by Andres Rueda.

A quick update: Since Joe Biden warned us not fly or take public transportation, the Centers for Disease Control increased its estimate of H1N1′s impact in the U.S. to nearly 18,000 cases and 45 deaths — extremely mild compared to a normal flu season. Nevertheless, because of the illness’ appearance in more than 70 countries, the World Health Organization raised its pandemic alert level to its highest point (6 out of 6), meaning “there are now ongoing community level outbreaks in multiple parts of world.”

Outside of the public health community, the use of the word “pandemic” has felt like an overstatement in light of the facts-and the faded memory of school closings and horror stories crossing the border from Mexico. Two recent articles comment on the reassessment of the one-time public health scare.

The New Yorker ran an historical allegory about psittacosis, or parrot fever, an illness that befell exotic bird owners in late-1929/early-1930 (and, interestingly, led to the creation of the National Institutes of Health). To the population at-large, it ended up being much ado about nothing; in fact, today, it still exists, infecting fewer than 200 people per year. Author Jill Lepore examined the media coverage in response to the outbreak, which initially portrayed scientists as superheroes pitted against a formidable, infectious villain. She writes:

Psittacosis incited, if briefly, a sizable panic among people who, by any reasonable measure, had nothing to fear. That was dangerous. Even as the story unfolded, what to make of parrot fever and just how much responsibility the press or the scientific community bore for the panic proved matters of dispute. But what happened next seems nearly as dangerous as the panic itself: people suddenly started insisting that parrot fever didn’t exist.

Is that happening again? Isn’t all this talk of swine flu as a “pandemic” combined with the lack of human-culling power that the label promises conditioning us to be flippant in the face of future public health concerns — possibly to our own detriment?

Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. examines this very topic in “The Doctor’s World” column in this week’s Science Times. Apparently, part of the problem is that pandemic isn’t officially defined within the medical community. There’s no agreed upon standard for what causes one, how an illness affects a particular country that it spreads to or when one ends.

United States and W.H.O. officials say their preparedness plans are intended for governments, not people in the street,” Dr. Altman writes. “Officials bristle at criticism that their messages and plans have led the public to equate the word pandemic with the Spanish influenza of 1918-19, the worst recorded pandemic in history, killing 20 million to 100 million people. (The double use of pandemic in that sentence could lead to further confusion about how to interpret the word.)

The editor of the “Control of Communicable Diseases Manual” assures Altman that the next edition of the reference book will contain an official definition for pandemic. But will that be too late for this generation? When the next pandemic comes around-and is actually a pandemic worthy of the word as we now interpret it — will we puff out our collective chest, go about our business and say, ‘I’ll worry about that…when pigs fly.”

Maybe we should shelve pandemic until the time when we actually need it–and hopefully that’s not sometime in the near future.

Art Credit: Photo by Ben Chau.