Each week, the Nature Publishing Group puts out a press release announcing those papers that will be published the following week by Nature and the monthly Nature research journals. For most papers, this will simply be a title and a PDF—enough to allow an interested journalist to write something about the paper if he or she is inclined. For a few that are likely to be of particular interest to the general public, a summary of 200 words or so is included to highlight the work. We are not alone, of course. Universities and institutes have their own highly effective communications offices, which generate publicity for their scientists. By and large, this system works reasonably well to improve the quality of the stories that are written in the mainstream media.

But not always. Based on scans of recent stories relating to papers in NG, we have to give a thumbs-down to United Press International (UPI) for two cringe-worthy wire stories.

The first covers this week’s paper by Irwin McLean and colleagues reporting an association between a variant in the gene filaggrin and atopic dermatitis. It opens reasonably enough: “Scientists at Scotland’s University of Dundee have discovered a gene that may lead to finding a treatment for dry skin problems like eczema.” And it closes with a good quote from McLean: “We see this as a dawn of a new era in the understanding and treatment of eczema and the type of asthma that goes with eczema as well.” The headline?

New eczema treatment likely soon.

Ouch. This is the sort of claim that you’d think a wire service would ban as a matter of course, unless their definition of ‘soon’ is different from the one in my dictionary.

Going back a few weeks, NG published a paper from Michael Waters and colleagues at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, showing that mutations in the potassium channel KCNC3 underlie degenerative cell death in two families with ataxia. This result is particularly noteworthy because it provides the first evidence implicating defective potassium channels in neurodegeneration. The UPI story starts off inauspiciously, with the vague headline “Cell death tied to certain brain disorders”. The first sentence, however, is truly eye-catching:

An international research team has reportedly provided the first conclusive evidence that some disorders can be caused, at least in part, by gene defects.

Pauling and Ingram probably thought they covered this ground already.

The explanation for this oddity is revealed when you look at the Cedars-Sinai release, which was presumably the source for the UPI story. It uses the same wording, but rather than end with “gene defects” it tacks on the phrase “that interfere with the electrical impulses of rapid-firing brain nerve cells called bursting neurons”.

Should we care about errors like this? Well, we all make mistakes; it’s true. At the very least, however, the first example serves as a reminder to authors, editors and publicists to be careful in the language that is used to describe a breakthrough in basic science. Even if we are careful, as we were in this case, unwelcome hype is always a possibility. The second example shows that, in the absence of journalists with some relevant background in the subject, science news may be particularly vulnerable to error. One wonders if a similarly nonsensical truncation of the lead sentence in a political story would have seen the light of day, or remain uncorrected for three weeks (and counting)?