I wish these articles were more useful. However, I will beat my usual drum and point out that a major reason we cannot tell one such article from another is tha

I wish these articles were more useful. However, I will beat my usual drum and point out that a major reason we cannot tell one such article from another is that the original articles are behind a thirty-two-dollar-per-article paywall. I worked as a cancer researcher for a few years, and I assure you that the details can be quite interesting if you can see them. But from this writeup I can't see a thing. They delivered DNA to a mouse with cancer. Did the mouse have mouse cancer or transplanted human cancer? If the mouse had mouse cancer, how did it get that cancer? Did they administer carcinogens, or use mutant mice with cancer-prone prostates? If the mouse had human prostate cancer transplants (a typical technique) and those were cured by mouse anti-human antibodies formed in response to virus-borne human prostate DNA... does this have any relevance to human treatment at all, given that humans don't routinely come down with cancers that were transplanted from other mammals? And, crucially, what happened to the prostates of the mice? Did they get attacked by the antibodies that attacked the cancer? If not, why not? If so, are we really prepared to attack, say, stomach cancer by inducing an autoimmune response that might also attack the stomach itself? That doesn't sound so great! These aren't even very sophisticated questions. (I was never a very good cancer researcher.) Anyone with a freshman education in bio could ask these basic but enlightening questions. And maybe someone with a Nature Medicine subscription would be kind enough to answer them. Because this popular-press rehash of a press release sure doesn't help much. As you say, such rehashes all sound the same. The devil is in the details, and the details are always missing. EDIT: in my eagerness to give examples of basic questions I realize that I'm being a little too cartoonishly obtuse. In fact, we can deduce from the fact that the mice apparently can form antibodies that they are immunocompetent, which implies that they probably do have mouse cancer, because it's hard to transplant human cancer into a mouse with a functioning immune system. They reject it. But I shouldn't have to guess this stuff. It's all right there in Nature Medicine. Somewhere. Pity that the karma I'd earn for this comment isn't worth thirty-two dollars to me.