The sharp-eyed Antonio Regalado at Technology Review noted that the Wall Street Journal accompanied its story on the Supreme Court gene-patenting decision with a giant picture of DNA–backwards:
The Journal's right-tilted editorial page should be deeply offended that the picture shows a progressive, left-handed DNA. As any proud conservative should know, DNA spirals to the right, like a right-handed screw, making it, I suppose, a deeply conservative molecule.
Perhaps the Journal got the picture from another publication with a right-leaning editorial stance, Forbes, which veered left a couple of years ago:
There is a kind of DNA that twirls to the left, but it doesn't look like these pictures. You can find other examples of flipped photos resulting in left-handed DNA at the Left-Handed DNA Hall of Fame, which honors these lapses.
"Should anyone care?" Regalado asks in an email. As he points out, this suggests that reporters perhaps do not understand all this as well as they should, some 60 years after Watson and Crick decoded the structure of DNA.
Conservatives certainly should care. Molecules like DNA don't come along too often, and they won't want to lose this one.
-Paul Raeburn
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