The first thing I do when I get up is make tea and put the TV news on and the first thing I heard this morning woke me up good and proper. One of the headlines was that scientists Down South have succeeded in doing what I am attempting to do in my work and the way the news was delivered I was convinced that my project was now redundant. When I got to read the original research article however it was far from 'problem solved' as the BBC had led me to believe. While interesting, it really is nothing new and although they claim to be using this "cutting edge" approach, the methods they're using are about 30 years old and they haven't implemented the more recent modifications which would make it a much more powerful technique*. What really bugs me about this though is the way it is being reported in the media. The research is interesting but really not "a breakthrough in the fight against the debilitating disease". It happens all to often that news is overhyped to the point that it becomes inaccurate and misleading (okay, so not just in science reporting). Take the case of the MMR fiasco for example, the story about the MMR vaccine causing autism. But the fact that the research was repeated and found to contain a fundamental error hardly made the news at all because it wasn't nearly so catastrophic. Rant over.
*Yes the vagueness is deliberate since it wouldn't take much fishing to work out my true identity (not that anyone could be bothered I'm sure) and that's something that I, perhaps even the world, is not quite ready for!
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