I wish to raise a slightly different angle -- I am one of the downstream bottom feeders, a science writer, whose business it is to try to read as much as possible of the bleeding-edge, and then to try to interpret it for a lay audience. My aim is to underline new developments, how they arise, and what they may mean.
I have been at this sort of thing a long time, and I can manage to make sense of perhaps half to three quarters of what I read in "Science" and "Nature", and rather more in a few more specialised areas, but a lot of stuff goes through to the keeper without anybody reacting to it. My concern is that there almost needs to be a lower level of interpretation and archiving going on. I suspect that there would be quite a few biologists who have no clear notion of what a cytokine is, for example -- but there would be many more teachers of science who have no idea what a cytokine is, and a far greater number of students in that position. Thomas Kuhn argued that undergraduates did not read the original literature, a third of a century or more back -- how much worse is the position now, and what difference will self-archiving make in the future? My science-teacher wife has a recent textbook on her shelf that refers to Zinjanthropus, a name that ceased to have any application other than historical in 1965: it seems to me that the information-poor are among us, in all our schools. Is it possible to enrich them? peter macinnis
