This was the year, ladies and gentleman: We finally "cured" cancer.
I'm not serious, of course. No such thing happened. But if you believed what you read in the press in 2013, you would certainly think it happened. And it happened three times, as I explained on last week's Science Friday as part of a journalists' round table on the top stories of 2013.
I facetiously told Science Friday's host Ira Flatow that we had "cured" cancer, but only in the media–not for real in the laboratory or the clinic. TIME magazine cured it with its "How to Cure Cancer" cover story in March. The New York Times "cured" it again in October, under the headline "Breaking Through Cancer's Shield," a discovery described as "amazing," "a game-changer," and "a watershed moment." And Esquire did it in December with "A Whole New Way of Killing Cancer," which it called "the most extraordinary story we've ever published." Really?
Listen to my report of the "cure" on Science Friday. The cancer "cure" silliness begins at 12:00, but I recommend that you listen to the whole segment. Josh Topolsky, the founding editor of The Verge; Mariette DiChristina, editor in chief of Scientific American; and Ira had lots of interesting things to say about the ups and downs of the year's science coverage–neutrinos, gene patents, climate, the DSM-5, Elon Musk, and more.
Oh, and I forgot to mention this on Science Friday, but this was the year we also "cured" diabetes. (No, of course not.) Boston magazine gets the credit for that one.
-Paul Raeburn
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