Alzheimer’s in a dish: A game changer?

Gina Kolata of The New York Times has a knack. She can write a lede as well as anyone in the business. Here was Sunday’s:

For the first time, and to the astonishment of many of their colleagues, researchers created what they call Alzheimer’s in a Dish — a petri dish with human brain cells that develop the telltale structures of Alzheimer’s disease. In doing so, they resolved a longstanding problem of how to study Alzheimer’s and search for drugs to treat it; the best they had until now were mice that developed an imperfect form of the disease.

Kolata evidently did not have the nerve or the perspective to call the discovery astonishing herself, so she put the word in the mouths of other researchers.

None of them actually used it. But she did elicit a barrage of superlatives from the people she chose to quote. The discovery, they told her, was “a giant step forward,” “a real game-changer,” “a paradigm shifter,” and a “tour de force.” Kolata summed that up as “astonishing.”

The story ran on p. 10 of Sunday’s paper. Which puts the Times in a tricky position: If the discovery (don’t worry, we’ll get to that) was all that Kolata said, how could this story not be on the front page? How often is a scientific finding described as a “tour de force”?

The only conclusion is that the editors didn’t entirely accept Kolata’s use of quotes to characterize this as astonishing. But if they didn’t believe Kolata’s characterization, why did they publish it?

Maybe the editors at the Times have read too many astonishing stories. Kolata’s astonishment on Sunday has already been eclipsed by a piece by Michael Benson in this morning’s Science Times, which refers to “the astonishing work of the undeservedly obscure English astronomer Thomas Wright, who in 1750 reasoned his way to (and illustrated) the flattened-disk form of our galaxy.”

But “astonishment” is not our only concern here. The editors and headline writers who didn’t put the Alzheimer’s story on page one nevertheless described the work with a word that is even more astonishing than “astonishing.” That’s right; they called it a “breakthrough.”

The problem with “breakthroughs” is that it’s hard to recognize them until they have had time to mature. Engineers who recognized that a current could be used to turn a switch on and off couldn’t be sure they had made a breakthrough until they saw how people began to use the lopsided, three-armed gadget they called a transistor. And they could not possibly have envisioned millions of the things on a single chip. The transistor was a breakthrough.

In this case, we’re talking about an advance that makes it possible to see Alzheimer’s disease–or some approximation of it–develop in neurons in a laboratory dish. This promises to allow researchers to greatly speed up the testing of potential new Alzheimer’s drugs in the laboratory.

If the advance leads to effective, new Alzheimer’s drugs, we might call this a breakthrough. Or we might reserve “breakthrough” for the drugs developed using this system.

If years go by, and the work speeds Alzheimer’s research but doesn’t lead to a sudden “game change,” then we might not consider it a “breakthrough”–or even particularly “astonishing.”

Kolata acknowledged that this is a serious problem. “The crucial step, of course, will be to see if drugs that work in this system stop Alzheimer’s in patients,” she wrote. That single sentence, an island of doubt in a sea of superlatives, should have appeared in the second paragraph, and it should have prompted Kolata and her editors to dial down the astonishment.

Sadly, some of the other stories I saw were not much better. At FierceBiotech, John Carroll, who seems to be writing off of the Times story, says the authors of the new research are racing to find “a potential megablockbuster drug that can stop the disease in its tracks.” A potential megablockbuster? How about a potential astonishing megablockbuster breakthrough? And by the way–a potential drug never cured anyone of anything.

Alice Park at TIME wrote a slightly gentler lede: “Researchers have overcome a major barrier in the study of Alzheimer’s that could pave the way for breakthroughs in our understanding of the disease…” But she doesn’t quote anyone saying that; she’s apparently expressing her own opinion here.

Frederick Kunkle at The Washington Post likewise failed to ask anyone other than the authors of the research whether it was important. And he missed the lede–that this could speed drug testing.

None of the stories I saw highlighted an important notion that comes straight from the abstract of the study: The technique used to produce a version of Alzheimer’s disease is a dish “should also serve to facilitate the development of more precise human neural cell models of other neurodegenerative disorders.”

If this has broad applicability in other brain disorders, this is even bigger news than it seems. One day we might even call it a breakthrough.

-Paul Raeburn