There is an obvious downside to this aggressive culture. It encourages triumphalism, so that every gene is a milestone on that road to a cure. It nurtures scaremongering, so that every GM crop seems likely to run amok. The pressure to be first leads to half-baked copy. I doubt that the consequences are as awful as some scientists fear.
Most readers are ignorant but smart, just like scientists reacting to news outside their field.
Equally, they are skeptical of bland reassurances, one of the many legacies of the BSE fiasco. Scientists could learn from the journalist's obsession with the reader. At the Telegraph, we have commissioned a dozen polls on public attitudes toward science. Perhaps the best example of this is a series of mass experiments we have run with BBC's Tomorrow's World TV program since 1994. The first experiment, investigating the cues used by people to detect lies, saw more than a million attempts to ring our phone lines.