RadioScope: The Material World on BBC Radio 4, Thursday, December 15th, 4.30pm
Scientists anxious to spark an interest in their subject among young people, often adopted a jolly, isn't-science-fun style of communication.
Quentin Cooper, presenter of the usually excellent BBC Radio Four science series, The Material World, is such a person.
I wonder if this is why I found the programme on human cell stems and on the controversy surrounding their use for therapeutic purposes so irritating?
His reference to "all things genetical" as he introduced his subject seemed to jar. After all, the subject is one of the most serious that we face as human beings at the present time.
When philosopher Mary Midgley spoke about balancing our concern for embryonic stem cells with the relative lack of concern displayed by some people for those already living, Cooper responded with a quip about having a freelance philosopher in the audience and compared his programme to Gardeners' Question Time.
There again, perhaps this listener was simply in an irritable, curmudgeonly mood.
The media philosopher-guru Marshall McLuhan suggested that radio evokes stronger emotions than television. At least I think that is what he suggested - much of what he said when he was a hot item back in the early 1970s was incomprehensible to me.
So perhaps I have become one of that small army of carping radio listeners who search around for something to annoy them.
The jokes aside, the programme was also irritating because it did relatively little to add to listeners' knowledge on the issue.
We learned what we already knew: that the area of stem cell therapy is controversial and important and that we really ought to educate ourselves about it.
The programme took the form of an audience debate with experts at the top table.
Asked about the choices which stem cell therapy will open for us, Dr Colin McGuckin, a professor of regenerative medicine, suggested that we may in the future face the question of how long we want to live. Do we want stem cell therapy to keep us alive for longer if we are no longer able to enjoy life?
This is a question which has been asked many times by many people since before we heard of stem cell therapy. The old dilemmas, it seems, never go away.
The same point emerges in the debate over the use of embryonic stem cells for therapy. It raises all sorts of questions about how we treat potential life, about when life begins and when humanity begins.
Many people hope that this debate will become irrelevant if the use of adult stem cells is developed.
Dr McGuckin, however, suggested that adult and embryonic stem cells would be used for different purposes and different therapies. So we are not off the hook and the debate must go on.
But the debate has been going on for so long now that there must be doubts as to whether it will ever be resolved to our satisfaction. The medical director of the Institute of Human Genetics, Prof John Burn, reminded us that many centuries ago the Catholic Church debated the issue of whether we have a soul from the moment the sperm and egg combine, or whether we acquire a soul later on. That is really the same debate that goes on today about abortion and stem cell therapy.
I suspect that most of us will more or less ignore this very important debate and will be quick to put our doubts to one side if a stem cell therapy comes along which can save our lives or preserve our quality of life. The need to survive can sweep principle aside.
But the issues are important and we need informative coverage of them in the media. This programme, unfortunately, was not a good example of how such coverage should be done.
• Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor.