The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine, but lately they have been. And that's not counting the columns by the food writer Mark Bittman, which often deal with science and nutrition.
Here's a quick review of recent stories:
Mar. 10: The Allergy Buster (cover).
Feb. 24: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (cover).
Feb. 10: Why Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart.
Feb. 3: The Boy with a Thorn in his Joints.
Jan. 27: The Price of a Stolen Childhood (cover).
It's an impressive list.
The allergy story by Melanie Thernstrom, the most recent of them, is a strong story. Allergies are complicated and not well understood, and many, many stories are written about unconventional and unproven treatments, presumably leading many patients and their families astray when they might be helped by conventional treatment. This is not one of those stories.
Thernstrom paints a powerful portrait of the story's lead character, Dr. Kari Nadeau, who is conducting trials of experimental therapy to cure children of multiple food allergies simultaneously. The print magazine refers to this, in the subhed, as "an experimental new treatment." The website calls it "a radical new treatment." Experimental it is, radical it isn't. It seems to me to be the next step in the kind of desensitization treatments already in use–an evolutionary step, not a radical one. I'm puzzled by why the story would be described differently in print and on the web.
I found only one fluff in Thernstrom's story–when she tries to add a detail about the science. Early on, trying to explain the rise in food allergies, she writes, "Emerging evidence suggests that food allergies, however, fall in the province of the new field of epigenetics: the science of how the environment can alter the genetic inheritance one generation passes on to the next." That's fine, as far as it goes. But readers need a bit more than that, if Thernstrom is going to bring it up.
Much further on, in the penultimate paragraph, Thernstrom provides further elucidation–and she gets it wrong. Nadeau has found, she writes, "that treating allergies actually changes the genes by epigenetics (a chemical modification of the genes that does not affect the actual DNA sequence)…" That reveals a slight misunderstanding. Genes don't change "by epigenetics." Treating allergies, she should have written, could produce epigenetic changes in the patients–chemical changes that don't alter the DNA sequence but do alter the workings of the genes.
That, too, might be too brief for most readers. If Thernstrom wanted to describe the epigenetics of food allergies, she might have done better to take a few grafs, and to do it all in one place.
This is a small point, but it reveals a slight misunderstanding on Thernstrom's part, or on the part of her editors–or both.
[Update: After I'd posted this item, a reader suggested that I take a closer look at the genetics discussed in the article on how kids handle pressure. The article divides children into one of two classes–worriers or warriors–and says that this reflects the workings of a single gene. As anyone should know, and as reporters who've worked on a story like this are required to know, human behavior is affected by a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors. It's wrong to pin so much on a single gene.]
As is this case with the error in the Thernstrom article, a science editor would have caught this.
If the Times magazine is going to continue running so many medical stories, perhaps it should hire one.
-Paul Raeburn
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