t is with both hesitation and sorrow that I call to your attention what I regard as a serious lapse of judgment in the last issue of Research/Penn State. It was almost unbelievable that the article 'Almost Seashell' involving 'biomineralization' biomaterials could have been printed."

So began a letter we received in March, renewing old (yet real) questions about the style and message of this magazine.

"What does Research/Penn State want from its science stories?"

The letter-writer, Rustum Roy, directed Penn State's Materials Research Laboratory from its establishment in 1962 until 1985. No newcomer to seashell science, Roy was quoted in a January, Science News story titled, "Lab-grown shells mimic seashore version," which described the growing of "shell-shaped formations composed mostly of calcium carbonate, the primary mineral in seashells."

We had been writing about chemist Patricia Bianconi's "almost seashell" material when the Science News story came out; we asked her, "Does Rustum Roy know about your research?" Her answer was curiously prophetic, to the effect that no, he had not yet noticed her, a new, unpublished assistant professor. Rather than bring her work to his attention, she was waiting to see his reaction when the journal Nature brought out her first paper.

Nature published Bianconi's cadmium sulfide work on January 31, accompanied by a news report (titled "Flattery by Imitation") linking her process to that of seashells, bones, and teeth. The publication, Roy wrote us, "started a chain of events which has led me to write editorials for two journals, a letter to Nature, and a review article on the real biomimetic biomaterials which, would you believe it, is a stellar Penn State success."

He was not referring to Bianconi's work but to previous work by MRL researchers, whose creation of "real biomaterials" had been "reported in hundreds of papers" since the late 1960s. In his letters, Roy decried the "total failure to read or refer to the literature by the authors and journal-editorial process" and charged both Nature and Research/Penn State with exaggeration: "Science is being oversold, advertised like cigarettes using inaccurate, misleading exaggerations," he wrote; to us he added that to link Bianconi's material "to a seashell is totally outlandish to the point of deception."

The first charge is not ours to address. Bianconi had read the MRL papers; she chose not to list them among her references because they were, she felt, "unrelated" to her work, a judgment Roy could beg to differ with although several scientists at the University and outside have supported Bianconi.

But were the Nature and Research/Penn State reports exaggerated? Nature's editor replied in a May 2 commentary that "Roy's reaction to Bianconi is no less exaggerated than the supposed overselling of which he complains."

Bianconi herself affirms that there is "not a single misstatement" in the Research/Penn State article. "Many people have commented to me that yours is both the most intelligent and the most intelligible of all the writing they've seen on this subject, and I agree with them completely."

But Roy is correct that there is a difference between misstating and exaggerating.

atalie Angier of the New York Times, explained the writer's problem succinctly in a recent review: "We science journalists, perhaps more than any other class of reporters, too often serve as perky cheerleaders for our subject and our sources. Maybe that is because most of us really do love science; or maybe we are so worried that the rest of the world does not that we feel obliged to bring out all the bells, whistles, and bullhorns." This jazz-it-up instinct led us to lead off our story with the tease, "Next, we'll make a seashell, a nice, curved whelk" (a joke Bianconi and her graduate students shared) even while we ended saying, "It's not bone, not seashell, and has no known use . . ."

As Roger Martin, editor of the University of Kansas's research magazine, has written, "Rather than being a window — with source on one side, reader on the other — a science reporter must be a prism. Refractive writers twice bend what they are told — first by simplifying the science, then by coloring it with metaphor and analogy." In this case, the simile (Bianconi's material is like a seashell) was meant to persuade the reader to follow Bianconi through a bog of chemistry. Few of our readers are practicing chemists, interested in the research for its own sake. The rest of us want only to share Bianconi's enthusiasm and her adventure.

Talking with Roy about his objections to the Research/Penn State article, we learned that it was perhaps the photographs — the dramatic, aesthetic seashell portraits — as much as the use of metaphor which offended him, and it is with this insight that we return to the questions in Roy's letter.

"What does Research/Penn State want from its science stories?"

We want them to be read — which first requires that the magazine call attention to itself, that it be a distinctive face peering from the piles of mail and memos our wide audience receives, from the racks of kiosks and the doctors' office tables. And then that each article separate itself from the gray blur of words and stop the mindless page-turning of the harried reader. Electron micrographs of cubic crystals do not call halt nearly as well as sensuous photographs of whelk shells, so in this case we took poetic license, elevating a mere metaphor to photographic prominence.

An editor at Discover magazine concurs with this scheme: "What I assume people do is flip through the magazine, look at the photos and illustrations, and read the captions," Conrad Warre told CASE Currents magazine. "We hope the art is so graphically demonstrative it'll make you read the text." So do we.

"Does [Research/Penn State] aim to give new tidbits of up- to-date work at the University?" asked Roy. "In which case the stories are too long and too selective. . . . Or should Research/Penn State do only substantial stories on Penn State's major achievements over the last many years . . . ?"

None, both, all of the above — anything that will inform, entertain, and inspire the "University community," whom we define broadly as anyone interested in what Penn State's faculty and graduate students are doing when they're not actually teaching. Apparently, we're not too bad at it. This year, our peers at the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) bestowed a gold medal on Research/Penn State for "periodical staff writing" and a bronze for "special interest magazines."

And, coincidentally, we have another goal: To bring the work of new, unpublished researchers — assistant professors, graduate students, even undergraduates — to the attention of the senior workers in their fields. Sometimes we succeed. Oh, do we ever.