This week lead tracker Paul Raeburn wrote an excellent post on a fine and enterprising story by Tom Avril in the Philadelphia Inquirer all about how some shriveled bits of 19th century human intestine, pickled in bottles at a museum in town, yielded DNA from a cholera epidemic that swept the region more than 150 years ago. Avril localized the story superbly to help hold readers' interest. It stirred my resolve to look to see how other reporters covered that news. The news came with external booster rockets: It had the benefit of being the topic of a paper in the respected New England Journal of Medicine last week – with its accompanying press bulletin to the issue's contents – as well as a press release from a lab at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada (linked in Grist below). The news is that the study confirms that the 19th century epidemic is from a strain of cholera distinct from and more lethal than the one in circulation today. By being less lethal, it can sustain its human epidemics longer.
Avril wrote this with care, taking time to get the lowdown from the museum's staff on the venerable medical museum's collections and potential for more discovery of disease DNA in specimens from long-dead locals. But the news did get fairly wide pickup a few days earlier from a crowd of reporters that wrote it as breaking news, within a day or two after the NEJM report came off embargo. That's what this post is about. The rest of the stories are a fairly varied lot. Many reflect genuine speedy reporting – taking a tip to the bones of the story as declared in the press release and expanding on them with outside opinions, asides on related topics, and writerly flair. A few others I could find are merely press release regurgitations, redone or run exactly as handed out.
Other stories:
- NYTimes – Donald G. McNeil Jr.: With Help of Victims From 1849, Scientists Decode Early Strain of Cholera; McNeil, anold hand, enlivens the basic story by finding two outside sources with different opinions about the certainty of the study's conclusions. One of the experts is Rita Colwell, a good person to call. One, she's famous and once headed the Nat'l Science Foundation. Two, her interest in tropical diseases led her to see a link between Pacific Ocean weather (El Nino) and outbreaks of cholera. The mechanism is changes in ocean currents carrying the waterborne bacterium that causes the disease. Not that this was something for McNeil to put in the story.
- Globe and Mail (Canada) Ivan Semeniuk: Historic DNA sheds light on modern killer ; Well-written with a historic atmosphere, original quotes so far as I can tell, and ties the Canada work to the Philadelphia medical museum's collection neatly with a nod to a museum staffer's key role.
- Nature News – Ewen Callaway: Ancient cholera mysteriously disappeared ; Another diligently done job, although would quibble with calling this earlier cholera particularly ancient even if the primary lab work occurred at the Ancient DNA Centre. One of the aspects of the news's back story is that cholera in any variant is a fairly recent – a few thousand years ago – human disease. Good quote at the end, from a researcher in Denmark, gives a suggestion (via a first name reference to the lead author) how cozy is the community of people who do this kind of work.
- CP (Canadian Press) Helen Branswell: McMaster lab cracks genetic code of cholera bacteria behind 1800s outbreak ; Widely picked up by Canada's news outlets (eg Hamilton Spectator, CBC News which dropped her byline). Good word-turns here: Branswell reports that the team "mined a postage stamp-sized piece of tissue" from the Philadelphia collection. LIke the 'mined', love the traditional '-sized' rather than '-size' for denoting scale. Original quotes, one outside source provides a hurrah of an opinion and mentions potential for such paleo-genetic epidemiology for tracing evolution of other diseases.
- Agence France-Presse via GlobalPost: Jar of preserved intenstive solves 1800s cholera mystery ; Hmm. Quotes all from the press release. And one is unsure about the declaration that the discovery "may help prevent future outbreaks" and its attribution: "scientists said." The one quote from the primary investigator refers mostly to the piecing together of disease evolution and how this one it made the jump to humans. Other outlets tend to say the discovery is of great academic interest but has little obvious application to protection of public health.
- Red Orbit: Evolution of Cholera Unlocked By Scientists ; Well-written, mainly because somebody at McMaster wrote a solid press release. This is it. It does get credit as such. One wonders how many science stories get more circulation to the public via aggregator churnalism of press releases than via science journalists trying independently to add some value to the handouts, expanding the story, and even to contradict them as reporting may permit.
- Medical Daily – Peter Sergo: Intestine from 1800s Cholera Victim Provides Clues About Deadly Pathogen: Preserved DNA Is A Window Into Historic Pandemics ; Oh my. As one who desperately needs an editor, I know the boat that Mr. Sergo is in. Somebody let remain to see the light of day these verbiages: "Hiding in Plane Sight" and assertion that the modern version recently "took over the reigns" from the cholera variants dominant in the 18th century. The outlet's 'about us' page says it has editors, and that staff reporter Sergo is medically savvy and has an MA in science journalism from NYU. Somebody's gotta tighten the reins. The story is otherwise spritely but relies on press release quotes. Sergo has had at least half a dozen bylines in the last week or so. The whole science-tech staff looks to be pretty hardworking, judging by output.
Tracker Bonus: The fossil and DNA news-making Poinar Family!
While nobody mentioned it while reporting this news — because it's irrelevant is why but irrelevancy is my specialty — the lead scientist in this research, McMaster's Hendrik Poinar, at the university's plainly yet evocatively named Ancient DNA Centre, has quite a pedigree. That name rings a loud bell to old time science journalists. He's an ace at old DNA in part because he got the bug at his pop's knee. That'd be George Poinar, now affiliated with Oregon State U. In the 1990s the senior Poinar was at UC Berkeley where, it sometimes seemed, he popped up in the news every few months. He liked talking with reporters and pulling samples from his shelves and cabinets. He became the world's best known authority on insects trapped in amber – sometimes preserved in such hardened tree resin pretty much complete and soemtimes for many thousands to many millions of years. He extracted DNA from some of them. By grossly exaggerating the capability of this method for finding ancient complete ancient genomes novelist Michael Crichton implanted a semi-scientific spine into his Jurassic Park book and the movies it generated. You will of course recall that Crichton's fictional premise was that mosquitoes or other blood sucking insects not only drank from dinosaurs and then sometimes got stuck in oozing resin but still had dino DNA in their bellies AND had feasted upon just about all the dinosaurs that are today favorites of the public. Anyway, his boy Hendrik is carrying the family spear well. And the father is still making news. By the way, Hendrik is a leading authority on mammoth DNA. He has traced the beast's evolution from fossil DNA (didja hear that N. America's mammoths came here from Asia, got isolated for a long time, and then went back over the intermittent land bridge and eventually supplanted the stay-at-home versions?). He also is a big fan of recreating wooly mammoths, even did a TED talk on that. Wandering further: Yale's environment360 has a fine pro-and-con between Stewart Brand and Paul Ehrlich on exactly that issue. They do fine but Hendrik might have been more expert.
Tracker bonus #2: Speaking of Mammoth de-extinction, a man not in the news so much lately, but also a hearty proponent of returning big hairy elephants to the steppes, and wildly (in-)famous, is topic of a superb new report from S. Korea, a must-read that really deserves a separate post:
- Nature News – David Cyranoski: Cloning comeback/ Ten years ago, Woo Suk Hwang rose to the top of his field before fraud and dodgy bioethical practices derailed his career. Can a scientific pariah redeem himself?
Grist for the Mill: McMaster University Daily News/ Press Release ; NEJM Abstract ;
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