Cloning 2
Cloning 2Newspaper Article Essay: "In Layman's Terms"
Authors of modern scientific journalism convey information to target audiences in differing formats, depending solely on the level of education of the audience and how the issue might affect their lives. As a result, publications come in two models: new, original articles, or reports based on existing published material. The original articles appear in technical scientific journals and cover intricate scientific subject matters. Authors construct these articles specifically for individuals whom have a great understanding of science. The usage of complex vocabulary and discussion of technical concepts within these journal articles make good sense to those with strong science backgrounds, but not to the lay audience. On the other hand, the reports constructed from existing information are broadly based, pulling information from several sources and adapting it for target audiences. Such articles tackle general biomedical issues and convey the information to an audience that, for the most part, lack a high level of scientific knowledge. To make the information more understandable for the target audience, authors substitute in less complex vocabulary words, summarize difficult concepts, and often utilize attractive visual aids. Authors strive to communicate issues to audiences of varying levels of education. In order to accomplish this effectively, authors adapt their work in a format that expresses their concepts to audiences in pragmatic fashion. However, a disadvantage is that these adaptations can lead to misinterpretations of information.
Attached is a newspaper article I obtained through the web but was printed in the "Discoveries" section of The Dallas Morning News on September 14, 1998. It was written by Karin Jegalian and it focuses on cloning and its biological, practical, and ethical issues. Jegalian's primary aim is to highlight specific successful cloning projects and speculate about how those developments might affect not only the science community, but society as a whole. In order to convey this information, Jegalian uses articles from the journals Nature and Natural Medicine as the foundations for her article. However, to intelligibly present the article to a mass audience, Jegalian alters the information from the journal articles so that it would not be intimidating to readers. For example, she substitutes simple vocabulary for complex vocabulary. Also, without misrepresenting any material in the journals, she uses the articles as supports rather than reproducing them. Effectively, she combines certain parts of the material so that they would fit her article where support was necessary. As a result, her article, overall, proves more comprehensible.
Comparing Jegalian's newspaper article to the journal article taken from Nature Medicine, a difference can be seen in the usage of vocabulary and terms. The first article that Jegalian uses is a journal entry entitled, "Regenerating functional myocardium: Improved performance after skeletal myoblast transplantation." It is the published work of a team of researchers headed by Dr. Doris Taylor of Duke University Medical Center. The scientists theorize that the addition of skeletal muscle cells to the disease-damaged cardiac tissue can have a positive effect on cardiac function. According to Jegalian, the researchers construct a model of heart disease by damaging actual cardiac tissue and then inject the skeletal muscle cells to the test subjects. The test subjects for the experiment were rabbits with normal cardiac function. Jegalian describes the work of the researchers using simple terms. For instance, she writes that "The biologists mimicked heart disease by freezing heart tissue enough to cause damage." Words such as "freezing" and "heart tissue" are substituted for words like "discrete cryoinjury" and "myocardium" respectively. Further on in her article, Jegalian explains that the researchers inject muscle cells into the damaged parts of the rabbits' hearts, guessing that the muscle cells will replace the damaged parts of the heart and act like cardiac cells. To get a stronger, more accurate perspective on the research, Jegalian interviews Dr. Taylor, and adds some of her comments into the article. However, Jegalian only scratches the surface of the actual material covered in the article, leaving out much detail that the lay audience might find confusing and hard to understand. For example, the journal article refers to freezing of the hearts as "cryoinjury of adult rabbit myocardium" causing "cryoablation" which would illustrate "myocardial infarctions." Jegalian sums these ideas up as freezing the heart to pattern the effects of heart disease. The muscle cells Jegalian described are presented in the journal article as "myoblasts" harvested from the "hind limb soleus muscle." The actual hypothesis of the research team was that "the adult heart lacks reserve cardiocytes and cannot regenerate." Therefore, myoblasts injected directly into the myocardium might aid the damaged myocardium by becoming structurally akin to myocardial cells. This complex hypothesis differs from Jegalian's adaptation in that it uses technical terminology instead of utilizing conventional vocabulary. Additionally, the researchers include several complex charts, slides, and graphs along with their written findings. The scientists prove their hypothesis and report their conclusions using similar technical terms. However, Jegalian elects to alter the article slightly without compromising its contents as she substitutes vocabulary and summarizes complex ideas. By omitting some material, Jegalian benefits her target audience, as the journal article is filled with profound material and complex vocabulary that would be difficult to comprehend without sufficient scientific background. After analyzing both pieces of journalism, I believe that both authors convey their material in appropriate manners. On one hand, Jegalian avoids alienating her readers with complex issues in the original articles, and, on the other hand, Dr. Taylor produces highly intricate information that can be useful to her peers.
The next part of Jegalian's newspaper article is based on a series of different journal entries in Nature ( attached is a copy of one of those entries). Jegalian begins one section of her newspaper article discussing the cloning of mammals. She goes on by adding that until the cloning of Dolly the sheep, no nucleus from a body cell in an adult "[has] been shown to direct the development of a whole animal." Jegalian points out that the nuclei of amphibian embryos produce the only adult clones. In her discussion of cloning, Jegalian utilizes the examples of the cloning of Dolly from the udder of a six year old ewe, supporting the validity of those findings with the example of the cloning of twenty-two mice by a research team at the University of Hawaii. These are the lead points of the next part of her article. Using these lead points, Jegalian conveys the idea that cloning has the capability to push biomedical engineering to new heights due to several advancements. She suggests that cloning could provide us with human cells and possibly begin mass production of human organs. In essence, Jegalian suggests that cloning could ameliorate numerous current biomedical concerns. Yet after reading the research of the Nature articles, it is evident that cloning is still in developmental stages. For example, in the first original Nature journal entry entitled, "Dolly is a clone-and no longer alone," the author writes that "the success rate of cloning is still relatively low." After reading this statement and others like it, it is obvious that Jegalian's adaptation of the topic of cloning in her article differs from the original Nature articles regarding the large-scale effects of cloning on society. Jegalian's article gives a slightly different overall impression that the Nature journal entries.
The series of the Nature journal articles take Dolly as a subject and prove her validity as a clone with much information on her authentication tests. Furthermore, the journal articles use the existence of twenty-two mice to validate the process by which Dolly was cloned. The first Journal article, "Dolly is a clone-and is no longer alone," clearly describes the process by which Dolly was created, and relates it to the mouse project done at the University of Hawaii. Reading through the Nature articles, it is evident that the entire series attempt to validate the cloning process. All of the research is conducted in order to reinforce the fact that Dolly's creation is not the result of a laboratory mistake. The authors convey their findings with firm statements suggesting that cloning will have an effect on society, either positive, negative, or both. Regardless of the findings, the article hint that there is still much research needed for the validation of the cloning process, and that Dolly is just one example of the validation process. Much of the material in the journal articles contain complex ideas and illustrations. In addition, they pose as an obstacle to comprehension by a mass audience. Clearly, the journal articles are intended for a specific audience. The authors of the publications construct their material in practical manners and effectively relay their information to specific target audiences. In contrast, Jegalian includes general statements and paraphrases some of the material from the journal articles. By doing this, she may have slightly altered the real intentions of an article. Yet this does not compromise its effectiveness, and in my opinion, makes her newspaper article more "readable" for an audience that would otherwise be perplexed by the elaborate scientific material.