DrBob comments on Alzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say

Alzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say (futurism.com)

submitted 9 months ago by artifex@piefed.social to c/science@lemmy.world

73 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer's disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn't even clickbait.

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 15 points 9 months ago (8 children)

We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we'll save test tubes from cancer...again.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 8 child comments

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 39 points 9 months ago (6 children)

If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 6 child comments

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 23 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Dude it's worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So...jaded.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 3 child comments

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

This is why almost everyone does development, not research.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

[–] username123@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

Do tell

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 4 points 9 months ago

There is a lot of incremental research that gets transformed into ZOMG YOU GUYS!!! by the research office. The journals are full of papers demonstrating a complete rescue of a disease model ( and I'm an author on some of them). What the papers are really demonstrating is the inadequacy of the animal model.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com's whole schtick. There's so much happening in science that doesn't get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer's gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago*

I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”

Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.

So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.