I'm still ruminating over the post I wrote yesterday trying to sort out the news in the breast-cancer study published Sunday in Nature. Apparently, George Johnson, an author and a contributor to The New York Times, is ruminating, too. I have proof--he published his ruminations on his blog, The Cancer Chronicles.
Much of the coverage of the study, as I noted yesterday, led with the idea that researchers had identified four kinds of breast cancer, a claim featured most prominently by The New York Times in a front-page story by Gina Kolata. My random walk through Google suggested that the four types had already been known, and I cited a 2006 JAMA study that had mentioned them.
Johnson has sorted it out on his blog, and the answer is more subtle than I had appreciated. According to Johnson, researchers have, for at least a decade, been talking about molecular subtypes of cancer--luminal A, luminal B, HER2-enriched, and basal-like. "The new study appears to go further," he wrote, noting that cancers that test positive for HER2 "do not necessarily fall into the same genetic category called HER2-enriched."
Johnson also proposed that the bigger news--I had my suspicions about this--was that one kind of breast cancer was strikingly similar to a kind of ovarian cancer.
This does not change the conclusion I came to yesterday: With some exceptions, the press did not do a very good job covering this study.
-Paul Raeburn
Comments
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Reg, and for letting us know about Ryan Flinn's story, with the ovarian-cancer angle in the lede.
I always wonder on stories like Kolata's how much is done by other reporters simply as a result of knee-jerk EDITOR reaction to an overplay on the Times' front page. I remember the first time Gina Kolata cured cancer on Page1 and the reaction of my managing editor at the time.
I think it was '98. I was at Newsday then, working with a knowledeable group of dedicated science writers, and he literally yelled at me for "missing" the biggest story of the century. Not sure if he used exactly those words, but that was certainly the import. In fact, one of my reporters, Bob Cooke, had written about Judah Folkman's work several times before, in the proper context, and had a book pretty much ready to go out on him. I showed him what we had done, talked the ME off the ledge, and we moved on. He wasn't totally convinced, but he gave us the benefit of the doubt.
However, it can be tough for a reporter to take that task on alone. I think some of what we see these days comes about because there just aren't that many science EDITORS around any more; writers often are reporting to a national desk editor with no background and little interest. When a managing editor yells, those editors listen.
Bloomberg's story on Sunday's study, by the way, used the word "confirm" in the lead to immediately signal that the four-forms-of-BC finding wasn't new, and pointed to the link between breast and ovarian cancer as the most compelling aspect of the report. Yes, I'm making a shameless pitch here, but the reporter -- Ryan Flinn -- did a solid job.