Science hype deserves negative attention for the harm it does including both to science itself and to patients.
I’ve seen two really egregious examples of hype lately in science headlines.
First from the Washington Post comes a stem cell story with a very hype-ful title:
Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk
What the heck? This is a small study and the stunning event could be a placebo effect.
The actual article by Ariana Eunjung Cha isn’t bad and has some balance, but overall this kind of thing is definitely unhelpful.
Note that for most media articles, the author has little-to-no say on the title. So you editors out there going for click bait on your science article titles, take it back a notch.
Then we have the CRISPR hype winner for the year so far from the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP) with a truly awful title for a piece by David Warmflash:
Heard of CRISPR gene editing? It can save your life
It can? Sign me up!
GLP is a genetic techno fanboy website that aggressively promotes all things genetic modification. They often use parts of my articles (without permission) and make up their own titles so it is very possible that Warmflash had nothing to do with that title.
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