A man in a white hat touches a wall painted with clouds.

Outsized claims — like the ability to reverse aging — can lead people to waste their money and time on treatments that aren’t backed by evidence.

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Overhyping science breeds false hope

Scientists and science journalists alike have a responsibility to communicate new discoveries with the utmost accuracy, sans hype.
Allison Whitten
| 2 min read
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In his opening remarks at the 1939 World’s Fair, Albert Einstein said, “If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people.” To achieve such a mission, new scientific findings must be communicated to the public. Yet, conveying the excitement of a new discovery with nuance and detail while upholding the utmost accuracy is often a tall task. If the findings are overhyped so much so that they become misleading and are no longer accurate, it becomes misinformation. In the case of medical science, misinformation can harm people’s health or create false hope for cures that don’t exist. Many people are more likely to believe medical misinformation when they are in vulnerable positions or have health-related anxiety.

Recently, scientists in the field of aging criticized the claims from Harvard biologist David Sinclair that his team discovered how to reverse aging. In one of the latest press releases from Sinclair’s company, Animal Bioscience, Sinclair is quoted saying that they “developed the first supplement proven to reverse aging in dogs.” On X (formerly Twitter), Sinclair promoted a link for his hundreds of thousands of followers to buy the supplement online. Many scientists feel that Sinclair is overhyping his work and profiting on it by misleading members of the public. Nir Barzilai, a geneticist and the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the Wall Street Journal, “The data is not good, you’re calling it the wrong thing, and then you’re selling it.” 

Since the backlash, Sinclair’s company corrected the press release to be more specific, instead stating that the supplement was “shown to reverse the effects of age related decline in dogs.” Here, they moved away from such a big, vague claim about reversing aging entirely to a somewhat more precise statement about the findings. 

As science journalists at Drug Discovery News, we often face similar decisions about how to convey the thrill of new results without hype or speculation. In a feature story for our May 2024 issue, I wrote about the potential for young blood to reverse the damaging effects of aging in organs throughout the body. To avoid extrapolating the findings too much to say that the treatment could reverse aging altogether, I focused on describing the effects within specific tissues and organs and always noting when results came from animal studies versus those in humans.

The researchers investigating young blood as a treatment were also very careful in sharing their conclusions so far, especially because some people are already trying out young blood infusions on their own due to the hype from companies in Silicon Valley. Tony Wyss-Coray, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and cofounder of the plasma therapeutics company Alkahest, told me, “We always try to be very, very clear that we're trying something. We're doing clinical studies. We're trying to see whether this has clinical benefit, but we never made any claims that this is going to make people younger or things like that.” This emphasis on accurate and measured communication is essential so that people can make informed decisions about their health that are based in fact, not cloaked in hype.

References

  1. Pan, W., Liu, D. & Fang, J. An Examination of Factors Contributing to the Acceptance of Online Health Misinformation. Front Psychol  12, (2021).
  2. Boyle, P. Why do people believe medical misinformation? AAMC at <https://www.aamc.org/news/why-do-people-believe-medical-misinformation>

About the Author

  • Allison Whitten
    Allison Whitten joined Drug Discovery News as an assistant editor in 2023. She earned her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2018, and has written for WIRED, Discover Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and more.

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September 2024 front cover
Volume 20 - Issue 5 | September 2024

September 2024

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