To be clear, I was calling the researchers who wrote those papers disingenuous, not you. I've reviewed scientific papers. I have seen some true garbage. This is

To be clear, I was calling the researchers who wrote those papers disingenuous, not you. I've reviewed scientific papers. I have seen some true garbage. This is probably why I have a pretty low tolerance for bad papers or paper puffery. Those papers are skirting around inconvenient facts to make their conclusions appear stronger, which they should not be doing. Nothing is wrong per se, it's just intentionally not clear. As an example of what I mean, take the Buonanno paper you linked. They say "We measured induction of the two most abundant premutagenic DNA lesions in the epidermis, cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD) and pyrimidine-pyrimidone 6-4 photoproducts (6-4PP) (4), as a function of UVC fluence in 3D human skin constructs immediately after exposure using the immunohistochemical approach previously described (7)." It's natural to ask the question, is that the right thing to measure? There is no reason to suspect that 222nm and 254nm light will cleave the same bonds, so you might get a completely different set of dissociation products. Reference [7] has nothing to say on this subject (plus is citation incest) and in fact links back (as Reference [16]) to Reference [4], so that's the one. Except... it doesn't support this claim. At all. In fact it kind of suggests the opposite, that you can get pretty wide variation here depending on the incoming light: "In addition, we showed that the sequence distribution of CPDs induced by natural sunlight is very different from that induced by UVC (254 nm) at sequence positions specifically containing 5-methylcytosine bases." So when I find crap like that in a paper that has a general air of puffery (as one, regrettably, must often take on these days in order to secure funding), I get really damn suspicious. I am not claiming anything is wrong, or that any claims are false. I am simply saying that the provided evidence is not sufficient to establish at least one of the paper's claims, and the authors are not forthright about it.