text_1: Scientists look to stem cells to mend broken hearts
text_2: It’s hard to know how a charity hoping to raise money for stem cell research could have achieved a better marketing coup than landing this story on the Reuters wire. Millions of readers worldwide were guaranteed to have seen the charity’s slogan about how stem cells can “mend broken hearts” right in the headline and lead of the story. Even the campaign’s mascot — the zebrafish — makes an appearance. What they did not see was any challenge to the extravagant claims made about cardiac cell regeneration, any discussion of the undoubtedly sky-high costs that would be associated with stem cell treatments, or any analysis by independent experts of the quality of the evidence supporting this line of research. Just about 1 in every 50 Americans has heart failure with about 400,000 diagnosed every year. The prevalence increases with age and the number of people with it will rise as a result of increased life expectancy. Heart failure symptoms can be managed with drugs and, in extreme cases, dysfunction can be helped with implantable assistive devices. But there is no cure. So, the announcement by the British Heart Foundation to raise and spend $80 million on research into cardiac cell regeneration is important and newsworthy. Stem cell therapy, gene therapy, nanotechnology and numerous other futuristic sounding medical treatments are beloved by researchers and health writers alike, and there are promising lines of inquiry to be pursued. The trouble comes when writers attempt to translate the very difficult, complicated and sometimes frustrating scientific process for a general readership. Instead of taking a very long view and writing about these treatments as one of many possibilities for how heart medicine might evolve in the future, stories like this one present the treatments as being tantalizingly available “within the next decade.”