Science Porn: Sizzle or Steak?

I have a scientist friend named Pierre who reliably knows just about everything about just about everything. He's sort of like the Professor from Gilligan's Island come to life - only more fun to hang out with.

I mostly refrain from forwarding science news to Pierre, because he's invariably way ahead of me. But this report, about a seeming breakthrough in creating artificial DNA, had me so excited that I couldn't resist sending it along to him.

As usual, I was dead wrong in thinking this was interesting. Here's what Pierre said:

"I hate these breathless science press releases!

This is nothing major, it's just an extension and confirmation of what has been done for ages; most anti-viral compounds, and many anti-cancer ones as well, are artificial nucleotides never seen before in nature. Of course DNA polymerase incorporates them into DNA; otherwise they would not be chemotherapeutic.

What this group has done is to clean up and extend somewhat something that has been known and exploited since the early days of 5-FU, AZT, and acyclovir. It's neat, and well worthy of a publication in Nature Chemical Biology, but that's not in a class of a paper in Nature, or Science, or PNAS, etc.

There are hints that they can make RNAs as well, although it's not clear whether they do that by transcribing their modified DNA, which would be a prerequisite for a living organism.

Then they would need to make modified tRNAs with working anticodons, load them (specifically) with unnatural aminoacids using specific enzymes (a.a. synthetases) that don't exist yet, and have them deliver those amino-acids to a growing peptide chain on a ribosome. It's a long, long way off, though conceptually not impossible (unnatural amino-acids can already be incorporated into proteins by tricking subsets of tRNAs that match subsets of redundant codons.)"

If you republish this email, make sure it's clear that the work itself is perfectly valid as far as I can tell, and that it *is* interesting, but that the press release is vastly overblown --and therefore counter-productive.

Incidentally, here is a much more sober and informative write-up. I have no problem with that summary; it puts the whole study correctly in perspective and actually explains what the interesting bit is, namely that the bases pair via hydrophobic interaction instead of hydrogen bonding, and that the modified RNA they made was indeed obtained by transcription of the corresponding modified DNA.

Here's the question that interests me: Is it that lay science buffs like me, who feed on a steady diet of this sort of news, are being played by science flacks who know just what sort of stuff trips our "gee-wiz" wonder wires? In that case, maybe I need to lay off that stuff for a while!

Or...is this actually completely and justifiably exciting news for anyone oblivious to minor scientific distinctions?