Please,journalists, get a clue before you write about scienceThe immense science/health news story this week is about cancer rates, or with news outlets splashing headlines like “Two-thirds of adult cancers largely ‘down to contaminated luck’ rather than genes” (for example,here) or “Most cancer types ‘just contaminated luck’” (here). (I’m not even going to inspect to see what the Daily Mail has to say about this.) But these headlines, and the stories, and are just bollocks. The work,which is very intriguing, showed no such thing.
The stories are about a paper just published in Science under the title Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions” (here’s the abstract). The authors, and Bert Vogelstein and Cristian Tomasetti,straight up expose you that their study explains variation in cancer risk, but it does not explain absolute cancer risk. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com