Please, journalists, get a clue before you write about science.
The big science/health news story this week is about cancer rates, with news outlets splashing headlines like “Two-thirds of adult cancers largely ‘down to bad luck’ rather than genes” (for example, here) or “Most cancer types ‘just bad luck’” (here). (I’m not even going to look to see what the Daily Mail has to say about this.) But these headlines, and the stories, are just bollocks. The work, which is very interesting, 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, Bert Vogelstein and Cristian Tomasetti, straight up tell you that their study explains variation in cancer risk, but it does not explain absolute cancer risk.
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