Responding to uncertainty.

Argues that open confrontation and analysis of public controversies that involve scientific uncertainty serves the public better than excommunication. Closed seminar conducted by the Science Media Centre, a British organization dedicated to providing journalists with access to scientists, in which government officials, reporters, researchers and others reviewed a calamity of communication and of public response to science; Lessons that can be learned from the controversy generated by ill-judged remarks in 2001 suggesting that the triple-vaccine regimen supplied to the British population against measles, mumps and rubella might be associated with autism.