In the olden days, you had to do a lot of hard work, a lot of well thought-through research, in order to get a paper published, and that was it. In the not quite so olden days, just publishing your results was not enough: you also had to push your results to the general press. A press release might help and a few really exiting results might make it to the newspapers. Today, all you need is an idea and a well-written press release, not something as old-fashioned as a result.

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This appeared on the BBC News website today: ‘A sample taken from what are believed to be the only polar bear remains to have been found in Britain has defied DNA analysis, it has emerged’. Let me translate that for you: ‘no results were obtained, it emerged’. To be clear here, researchers in Ireland took the remains of an 18,000-year-old polar bear, tried to extract its DNA, and failed. Then they still got their results on the homepage of the BBC News website. This shows that, in order to become a famous scientist, you do not need to have great results, just great press releases. I would not want to talk down the intelligence of the researchers involved; quite to the contrary. You too, if you are smart, should think about your press release. Hmmm, ‘researchers with big lasers find nothing, it emerged’….I like the ring of that!

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