In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we’ll save test tubes from cancer…again.
I feel like if the average person had any remote idea just how gloriously, horrifyingly complicated the human body is, we would be simultaneously far more skeptical of press releases, and far, far more invested in the actual science going on to figure out how to keep the whole cathedral from collapsing.
If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.
There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.
I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”
Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.
So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.
Dude it’s worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So…jaded.
Do tell
This is why almost everyone does development, not research.