text_1: Blocking “rogue gene” may stop cancer spread: study
text_2: It would set drug development speed records and defy all odds for a drug to enter clinical use within a decade after this sort of tentative laboratory experiment. Yet the story presents this single study that involved not even a single human subject as one that promises to “stop many types of the disease in their tracks” and to allow doctors to use chemotherapy and radiotherapy “with no risk of the disease taking hold elsewhere.” This is exactly the kind of story that leaves readers feeling whipsawed when clinical trials in actual patients may prove disappointing down the road. Scientists have every right to get excited when they find a new gene or make some advance that they believe holds promise for combating a particular disease. It is up to journalists to rein them in with careful analysis of the evidence and hard questions. This story offers neither. To the families who lose half a billion people every year to cancer in the United States alone, this is the kind of false hope that may cause more harm than good.