Monitoring scientific news in the general press

Illustration of the
initial news

Sometimes the general press is accused of opening up great expectations about scientific discoveries and forgetting about them when reality puts a brake on expectations. In other posts I have criticized this. That’s why I’m happy to be able to give an example of the impeccable follow-up of a specific scientific news, performed during a decade by a media outlet (the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia).

The initial news appeared on May 9, 2005 on pages 29 and 30 with the following headlines:

Genetic brake to lung cancer - New drugs improve the prognosis of patients who have a mutated EGFR gene.

The text echoed the discovery of drugs that act by inhibiting the action of a gene (EGFR), whose deleterious mutation can lead to the appearance of cancer (disordered multiplication of cells).

Over the next 10 years, this news received the following follow up in La Vanguardia: