Chemistry and the New York Times

Yesterday was the 167th anniversary of a significant event in industrial chemistry: Charles Goodyear received a US patent for the vulcanization of rubber. Two years earlier, by a mixture of luck and knowledge, Goodyear had discovered that heating raw rubber in the presence of sulfur preserved the material’s useful elasticity while boosting its resilience to heat, cold, and chemicals.

The New York Times was founded in 1851, seven years after Goodyear received his patent. I’m not sure whether the Times wrote about vulcanization in the late 19th century. But, based on its recent track record, I doubt today’s version of America’s most august newspaper would cover chemical news of similar import.

In its neglect of chemistry, the Times is hardly unusual. So far this year, the paper’s UK namesake, the Times of London, hasn’t published any news stories about chemistry—unless you count stories about reality TV stars, soccer players, politicians, and other celebrities who have—or lack—"chemistry.”

Newspapers, TV stations, and other media have to make money. As I’ve remarked before , the editors who decide what news reaches us have to gauge what interests us. Chemistry isn’t popular.

The New York Times strives to be comprehensive and unbiased in the rest of its news coverage. It will cover topics that are important but unlikely to be popular. Tuesday’s issue, for example, included stories about events in 20 different countries. In one of the stories, Andrew Kramer reported on protests in Belarus that followed the imposition of new export controls.

The same Tuesday issue contained, as usual, the newspaper’s celebrated science section, Science Times. Among the topics covered were opossums, drug abuse, empathy, equine herpes, and underwater spiders. All the stories were interesting, and some were important, but none struck me as resembling the Belarus story—that is, a story about a worthy topic that an editor presumably thought his or her readers ought to hear about.

If the New York Times treated science news in the same way it does international news, chemistry, condensed-matter physics, electrical engineering, and other hard sciences would appear more often in its pages. Readers would then get a more comprehensive and therefore a more accurate view of what constitutes humanity’s scientific enterprise.

Whether that change of approach would prove popular and profitable, I can’t say.