Buh-bye BIO

BIO is so over. The show ended yesterday with the news of the death of a police officer, Paris Williams, who suffered a heart attack on Tuesday while confronting a group of protestors near the convention center. The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper today said that five people were charged in connection with the officer's death with the most serious charges being two counts of aggravated assault leveled against a 23-year-old Canadian man. Four others were charged with resisting arrest, conspiracy and disorderly conduct, the paper said. Authorities said there wasn't enough evidence to justify a homicide charge while BIO said it would make some sort of a contribution in the officer's memory and called on conference-goers to make donations for the officer's family.

That was enough to make me decide that another trip to Philadelphia would just not be productive. Previously, I had documented my attempts to obtain media credentials to cover the conference as a blogger (see NBE June 10, 2005), but was denied. A spokeswoman for BIO said that the group had made a blanket decision against credentialing bloggers. She apparently didn't have her facts correct as the conference did have an “official blog” (see Bio Blog 2005 [http://www.bioblog2005.com/]), a publication written by Pradip Banerjee, president and CEO of Science Center, a technology park in the city. Banerjee previously was partner-in-charge of the pharmaceutical R&D unit of the Accenture consultancy.

The blogging of Banerjee and his staff, while gramatically correct, ranged from banal to soporific, and did not rise higher than existing as a digital pom pom for the event. And there was no mention of the death of Officer Williams. Official? Yes, but certainly not a blog that adds any credible value to the important discussions on healthcare, science, and economic development that the BIO conference exists to engender.

On the other end of the blogging spectrum, in between the numerous online PR postings of attending entities, I found BioBoom at http://bioboom.blogspot.com/. An unidentified third-party posting on the BioBoom site described the events at BIO 2005 as: “not much, just lots of your tax dollars being spent for prime rib dinners hoping somebody pokin [sic] needles in mice will move a company to your state.”

I think BioBoom is a useful site, but one with so many digital geegaws and widgets that a reader can only feel overwhelmed at the noise, rather than expertly guided to information. And, while it appears knowledgeable, apparently written by a life-sciences consultancy, it doesn't have the credibility or courage of identity and thus falls short of being the ideal information source that this medium can be. To me, it's the digital equivalent of Pimp My Ride.

So, in between, the syrupy commercial content of Bio Blog and the anonymous content of BioBoom, we think there is room for a journalistic take such as we are seeking to offer here. Shame that BIO didn't understand the role that independent journalists offer in a democratic society.