Great post, Hsien-Hsien, you’ve made a clear and comprehensible explanation. Unfortunately, this kind of mistakes are quite frequent…

Thank You Sherpa Hsien. This type of reporting is frustrating.
-Steve
http://www.helixhealth.org

[...] and biotech consultant Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei notes how a recent article on cancer risk in the LA Times confused the terms “gene” and “gene mutation”l the newspaper then offered [...]

lol @ Sherpa Hsien

I probably would have just grumbled if I had only seen the original article but the correction they issued didn’t make things any better!

I tutor a genetics and general biology course (the second semester deals with the basics of genetics and evolution) and have had the same type of misunderstanding that occurred in this news article has happen to every single student I have tutored as well.

What a lot of students get confused on is how we have two alleles. The confusion is not so much on how two alleles are passed on, but how the dominance and recessiveness and allele expression occur. Thus, when the students hear that a certain gene can lead to a certain disease/disorder, the understanding is that if the person has this gene, they will get that certain disease/disorder. Once the student understands how mutations can occur and why they occur, they then begin to understand what is meant by a person has this certain type of gene that leads to that disease/disorder.

The average person out on the street can get confused very quickly when it comes to this type of information.

The other confusion that occurs is why some people don’t get a disorder if they have a certain mutation. To understand this, a person needs to have learnt about gene expression, frame-shift, mutation loci, protein function, etc. This is not easy information to understand for the average person.

A lot of the students that I tutor have never heard of the word gene. If they have heard of the word gene before, the majority of them struggle to define what a gene is.

Accuracy in reporting by the media is crucial to helping education the American public.

Maybe some of the genetic specialists could contact some of the bigger newspapers in the country and ask if they can write short and easy to understand articles about how genes can lead to a disease and how testing is done.

Just making a new medical school curriculum and education other health care professionals is not enough to help out with education the American people.

This is frustrating and something I am constantly dealing with at Ask a Geneticist. People just don’t understand that we have two versions of each of our genes and that there are different versions. So I end up writing that in almost every one of my answers which gets a bit dull for me but is critical to understanding so much of genetics.

It is scary that an important paper like the LA Times would get something like this so wrong. Makes you wonder about other facts they are presenting.

Incidentally, with copy number variation starting to look more and more like a big deal, we can’t just say we have two copies of each of our genes anymore.

Barry,
Excellent points. I routinely tell my residents now that mendelian genetics is going bye-bye. I don’t think we can keep teaching these outdated skill sets. It confuses physicians and gives them a false sense of confidence. I can only imagine how bad it screws up the lay public.
-Steve
http://www.helixhealth.org