Editor:
I am disturbed by the discordance between the headline “Medical researchers
garner MRC millions” (UBC Reports, Feb. 18) and the substance of the
article which is that only 15 out of 99 applications for funding were successful
and that, of the $108 million awarded by the MRC, only $4.5 million came to
UBC. (Given the size of the population of British Columbia and UBC’s claims
to be second to none, we should have won 10-15 per cent of the awarded funds
with a success rate of 25 to 30 out of 99).
The news is bad news. Either you should not have published an article on the
results of the competition or you should have used a headline that reflected
the real substance of the results of the competition. But to try to portray
bad news as some form of good news is spin doctoring of the most abject political
character.
It is something that we have grown to assume is the norm for government and
company press releases, but surely not in a university news publication.
Prof. Emeritus Michael Smith, Director, Genome Sequence Centre
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