While it is a concern that formulation of cell culture media has been static, as you point out, it's not really the greatest concern, nor is it a new concern.

While it is a concern that formulation of cell culture media has been static, as you point out, it's not really the greatest concern, nor is it a new concern. For a lot of fields, culture medium is not that important as long as you can run controlled experiments reproducibly. The data produced still must be tested for any greater hypothesis than "Drug X causes an upregulation of gene Y in 293 cells." Not including that rigor, or at least that precise caveat, is sloppy science. That happens some, but unfortunately, a lot of science journalism enhances these opportunities for imprecision. That's how you get to headlines like "Drug X prevents cancer!" or later, "Drug X actually CAUSES cancer!" This is hard to solve. On the one hand, it is important to be effective communicators with the public (who do fund most of this work) and not to sit closed-lipped in an ivory tower, but on the other hand, most people are not prepared to understand the majority of the science that goes on in academic labs, or appreciate the importance or nuance. What are we supposed to do in the end? (I may be slightly off topic here). Anyway, yes, DMEM, F12K, RPMI, etc are not perfect, no, but it's important not discount the good science that has been achieved with them. With anything, it is important to have good experimental design.