Start The Week
Oct 22nd, 2007 by Eats Wombats
The BBC Radio 4 program Start the Week with Andrew Marr is a wonderful way to start the week if you have time to listen to it, and if you don’t I’ve just given you a link to the podcast so you can listen to it later. Among the guests I enjoyed listening to this morning was Craig Venter, whose autobiography, A Life Decoded, will be published on Thursday. This is something for the must read list. What a character Venter is. I will put his book on the shelf alongside The Magic of Thinking Big. Venter’s scientific entrepreneurialism and iconoclasm appeals to me.
I’ve read that he may not be a nice person, even a vulgarian, but I expect to find such guff laughable. Few people alive have taken life by the scruff of the neck and achieved even a fraction of what he has done. The stories of the politics behind the decoding of the human genome are definitely on my future reading list.
The scientific story of the last week has been James Watson going home to Cold Spring Harbor in some disgrace for some rather silly remarks he made, perhaps not expecting them to be reproduced — and indeed the Sunday Times chose not to focus on them, much to the Independent’s subsequent satisfaction. The Independent put them on the front page in 72 point type. Then everybody had to strike a pose and be judged on it — by the thought police. The Guardian, at least, considered the disgrace from a different perspective, and there was some support from Richard Dawkins and Colin Blakemore.
Time was when the Independent was an intelligent and principled paper, a reasonable alternative for those who were not natural Tory Telegraph readers, left wing Guardianistas or customers of Mr.Rupert Murdoch–anything from The Times to The Sun. How are the mighty fallen. No longer a broadsheet, it’s a tabloid and in the gutter with all the rest, pandering and soliciting for business from the ever fickle public. They compete now, like children’s comics used to do, with giveaways, and supplements. I would pay twice as much for a smaller newspaper with just news and intelligent comment on the news but it’s not an option.
It’s years since I read of a South American newspaper increasing sales and staving off extinction by adjusting the prominent of stories on the front page in successive editions in accordance with what readers of its website were clicking on. Can someone bring Last.FM’s business model to the news business? I would subscribe.
How fine it would be to be able to see what Craig Venter thinks is newsworthy in biology, say, and never again see an article about the personal lives of Britain’s journalists. Of course I would exempt Ariel Leve whose exquisite, witty writing about her neuroses is a thousand times more interesting than all the rest of the narcissism in print these days.
#1 James Shreeve’s The Genome War