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Corrected Title: Very Small Chance Drug May Shrink Some Tumors, Might Know in Two or More Years Why is reporting on medical research always so awful?

• epistasis 13y ago
  It's bad because most journalism is done by press release, especially in science where there are almost no reporters that understand the science. In this particular case, Science Magazine has competent understanding, but Irv Weissman is one of the greatest scientists of our generation, and either he or Stanford's press office is really hyping this particular avenue. I have a ton of respect for Weissman, but I thought the claims at the time were not merited, given the evidence I saw, but then I didn't have Weissman's experiences or brilliance. Older well-respected scientists do sometimes fall into a trap of getting hypotheses wrong, as is typical in science, but having their hypotheses being accepted as proven before all the work is done