Conclusions

Insight Into the Color Blindness Gene and Gene Therapy

This web page was produced as an assignment for an undergraduate course at Davidson College.

Conclusions

As you can see there are quite a few differences between a journal article and a popular press article even when they are on the same subject. The journal article takes the reader on a trip through the relevance, logic, methods, results, and conclusion of a scientific study. The article also ends with contextual suggestions for future investigations. On the other hand, our New York Times article took us on a roller coaster ride filled with suggestive and sympathetic language and ideas. Although the New York Times article stated the main points of the actual study, it left out some important details. Most importantly, Wade did not divulge how the researchers knew the monkeys had actually gained the ability to "see red" (a misinterpretation already). If he had mentioned something about the virus with the GFP gene, or the researchers mf-ERG they design to measure the monkey's ability to differentiate colors, the article would have been much more complete. In fact, he could have used a link like the one below to teach use something about GFP.

Kua rating:

The article should contain contextual and methodological information as well as results and conclusions made from a discovery-4/10- Wade included very little methodological information and most of his contextual information was irrelevant
The article should use at least two of the three rhetoric styles (pathos and logos) to draw in readers and present the discovery in a logical fashion-8/10- Wade definitely appealed to the reader's emotion by giving the names of the monkeys and their back stories, but he did not completely follow the logic of the journal article's methods.
The article should be a comprehensive account, not just part of the whole story-5/10- Wade gave most of the facts from the study but failed to say why the researchers did it in the first place.
Lastly, the article should focus more on what is being discovered than what has already been discovered-7/10- Wade did give insight into the future plans of the researchers, but he also got off topic when he was talking about old world monkeys versus new world monkeys.

Overall score: 24/40 (Eunice Kua may be a little disappointed)

Link to a website with information on GFP (Zimmer, 2009) Permission Pending*

References:

Eunice Kua, Michael Reder, and Martha J. Grossel. 2004. Science in the News: A Study of Reporting Genomics. Public Understanding of Science. 13: 309–322.

Zimmer, Marc. Green Flourescent Protein-The GFP Site. Nov 18, 2009

Wade, Nicholas. With Genetic Gift, 2 Monkeys Are Viewing a More Colorful World. The New York Times. Sep 21, 2009.

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