Behind the News
BY MARK SHWARTZ
Of all the scientific conferences held each year, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is in a class by itself. "An international science and technology extravaganza that influences science professionals around the world and generates extensive news coverage"—that is how the AAAS website described the 2007 meeting held Feb. 15-19 in San Francisco. And few institutions had a bigger presence at this global event than Stanford.
Of the 800 scholars and experts who spoke at this year's meeting, a whopping 31 were from Stanford—one of the largest contingents at the meeting, according to AAAS. Stanford speakers represented a remarkably broad range of disciplines, including psychology, law, medicine, chemistry, economics and earth sciences.
About 850 journalists and public information officers also attended the conference, including 180 freelancers, as well as staff reporters from the New York Times, BBC, Australian public radio and elsewhere. In anticipation of this international media spotlight, the Stanford News Service issued an unprecedented 15 press releases written by News Service staff writers and interns, as well as colleagues from the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the School of Engineering.
At times the media presence was a bit overwhelming. On Feb. 19, a crew from KGO television in San Francisco requested an interview with biological sciences Professor Chris Somerville following his press conference on biofuels. But wily reporters from BBC Radio got to Somerville first and quietly whisked him off to a secret room for a quiet one-on-one interview.
With so many competitors around, reporters had to come up with unique angles for their stories. Associate Professor Sebastian Thrun's popular symposium on driverless cars prompted this headline from London's Times Online: "Days of the idiot behind the wheel are numbered." The USA Today website posted the results of communication Professor Jon Krosnick's survey on climate change under the heading, "Public is warming to climate concerns."
More than 8,000 people attended the five-day conference, and Stanford faculty were among the most sought-after speakers. People literally sat in the aisles during physics Professors Andrei Linde and Leonard Susskind's symposium on dark energy, and it was standing room only at biological sciences Professor Robert Sapolsky's special lecture on stress and health. In fact, partway into Sapolsky's speech, one of the conference room walls began to disappear, prompting him to interrupt his lecture and ask, "What is going on?" It turned out that AAAS organizers had decided to open up the room by not-so-discreetly removing several large wall panels to allow a stressed-out, overflow crowd of about 100 to sit comfortably for the remainder of the lecture.
Throughout the weekend, researchers and writers were wined and dined at numerous events, including an evening cruise on the Bay and a science writers party held inside an aquarium. As Andrew Leonard of Salon.com aptly put it, the meeting was "something of a science journalist feeding frenzy," and it all happens again next February in Boston.
Editor's Note: This is the first of an occasional feature looking at the goings-on behind the News Service's coverage of the university.
