The media's mouth wrote another check that science's a$$ couldn't cash

It's frustrating when I see the media spin science. The media hype-machine puts scientists in the unenviable position of having to live up to unreasonable expectations. Unfortunately some scientists willfully contribute to the process.

Adam Keiper has a great post up on The Corner detailing comments from J. Craig Venter where he essentially puts the headstone in place over the grave of the "personalized medicine" that was supposed to result from solving the human genome.

Scientists are in large part brilliant people. I have worked in and around science for a long time and I have met and worked closely with some very, very smart people who have advanced science in very real, very tangible ways. But they have done these things outside of the media hype-machine. Most scientific advances are small, but when you add them together they become great. The field of cancer research, for example, has enjoyed so many tremendous successes that cancer is no longer the automatic death sentence that it once was. Many forms are highly treatable and patients are able to live long, healthy lives after being diagnosed.

The technology developed under the Human Genome Project may prove to be of some utility at some point in the future, but it was never going to cure cancer. It was never going
to revolutionize medicine. The people who made such claims were either
willfully ignorant or intentionally deceptive. Regardless, this serves
as lesson to us all. Beware the next best thing. Beware of the cure-all.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.