Science in the Triangle

Ten years ago, business and science reporters wrote a lot about Y2K, which was basically the concern that the date change from 1999 to 2000 would shut down the Internet. Instead, the Internet blossomed. A decade later, we’re just beginning to grasp what we should have really been worried about when we entered the 21st century: The Internet’s effects on the flow and distribution of information.

Today, the marketplace of ideas is virtual. It has no borders. Everybody can participate and be a publisher. And the number of channels to distribute the information is increasing.

At the same time, ever smaller and more specialized bits of information are spread on YouTube, blogs and Twitter and it is becoming more difficult to figure out which information is accurate, which information serves a hidden special interest and how different bits of information relate to each other.

As gatekeepers of printed information, newspapers were naturally suited to check, organize and analyze the increasing flood of information on the Internet. But most newspapers dropped the ball when they decided to give away their information online. How much can free information be worth? And once you attach no value to your information, doesn’t that change what you gather?

As a reporter writing about science, I learned to measure the value of information by how much readers could act on it. That turns information into intelligence. That’s why I cherish working on stories about breakthrough ideas: the discovery of new medicines, companies with counterintuitive business models, scientists whose innovations change the way things are done.

These stories are special because they tap the thinking of some very smart people. But fewer and fewer of these stories are appearing in newspapers. I hope scienceinthetriangle.org will not only fill that void, but fill it better.

The Internet is more suited to follow thought processes. In print, something gets lost from the fact gathering to the writing. Maybe it’s the immediacy I feel when I research the facts. Maybe its the back-and-forth of the interview. Maybe it’s my own thoughts that were triggered collecting the facts.

More than five years after writing about Oliver Smithies, the UNC-CH professor who received the 2007 Nobel Price in Medicine, I remember Smithies’ collection of laboratory journals. These handwritten accounts and pencil drawings of experiments, the earliest about half a century old, represented Smithies’ intellectual life’s work. But I’m still wondering how I could have better captured what unfolded on the pages of these journals.

The answer is important, because ideas spring from the information we get and digest.