Viral Downward Spiral: Can We Anticipate Science Controversies?

Facilitator: Misha Angrist

Session description:
In November the FDA sent an unvarnished nastygram to direct-to-consumer genetic testing provider 23andMe telling the company that it had to stop marketing its product because it was, in the FDA’s eyes, misleading the public and offering unfounded medical advice. The company had been in trouble with regulatory authorities before and was a favorite punching bag of the medical establishment since it launched in 2007. Yet somehow none of its prior contretemps provoked anything like the media firestorm that followed the FDA’s cease-and-desist letter. In this session we will ask why? What if anything was different about this particular online dumpster fire? Was the reaction purely a function of the precipitating event itself? Or do social media make such feeding frenzies inevitable? How is this case instructive to us as science writers?  

What went on in the session:
I showed some slides and gave some background on the history of direct-to-consumer genomics, how the landscape has changed, and how the relationship between the company and the FDA has evolved. Participants raised other controversies that have periodically flared up in the public consciousness, e.g., climate change and GMOs. We talked about industry money and marketing campaigns as antecedents. Based on Google and LexisNexis searches showing less than a massive uptick in media citations for 23andMe after the FDA letter, I questioned my own premise: was this really a massive firestorm or was it an intense but small flare-up that registered on the radar of the science community on social media? In any case I don’t know that we definitively answered the question. I think we probably left with at least two answers: yes, given a hot-button issue that appeals to a social-media-savvy crowd, a company with a high profile and a government agency with which the company has a contentious history, in hindsight we should have seen this coming. That said, the immediate antecedent—a harsh cease-and-desist letter made public just as the target company’s CEO is on TV and the cover of magazines—could not have been timed with much precision.