Step 9: Reading Science News

Now you know little bit about how the biological roles of genes are investigated. In newspapers, news about the discovering of the "gene responsible of cancer" or the "gene of intelligence" are published frequently. In this activity you will read some of these news and discuss and analyze its content.

How to proceed

1) Read (individually) the following three news from different medias, and work in teams of two to complete for each text the proposed CRITIC analysis table.

• Perpetually Single? Researchers Discovered A Gene That Makes Some People Bad at Relationships
• A Gene for Alcoholism is Discovered
• New research discovers gene that reduces risk of stroke

2) Make a debate with the rest of the classroom trying to answer the following questions:

• Are these news certain?
• Are they correctly explained? Is the tittle correct?
• Is the information correctly backed by scientific research?
• Which corrections would you do?
• What strategies will you use in the future when reading news about biomedical research?

Key ideas to take into account

• Association between two elements is not enough to identify one as a cause of the other: there might be other elements participating in a phenomena.
• Most of characteristics are poligenic (result of the combined effect of several genes) or multifactorial (result of the combined effect of genes and environment).
• The bigger the sample, the stronger the conclusions you can extract from an experiment.