Eye catching

" Scientists for the first time have used gene therapy to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness, a development that experts called a major advance for the experimental technique, " said the Gainsville Sun in Florida, the state in which the results were announced at a meeting last month. It's a story that excited many news editors with a number of angles to heighten reader or audience interest. From London's Independent, which splashed the story across its front page, the impression was that of a British achievement. " Experts hailed the research, supported by £1 million from the Department of Health, as a major advance in the treatment of blindness and predicted it would lead to new developments in gene therapy for other conditions, " the paper said. It went on to quote Dawn Primarolo, the Public Health minister: " This is a major achievement for British science and the NHS (National Health Service) and shows that we truly are at the forefront of innovation. " But, as the Gainsville Sun and other newspapers pointed out, British researchers were only part of the story. Some vision was restored in four of the six young people who got the treatment, three in the US and three in the UK. Two of the volunteers who could only see hand motions were able to read a few lines of an eye chart within weeks. While the Independent excitedly reported the visual improvements in one of the British patients, it's rival, the Guardian, pointed out on its front page, in a tag for its science page report on the work many pages later, that the other two British patients showed no effect. But other papers, like the Independent, were more upbeat. " It's a phenomenal breakthrough, " said Stephen Rose, chief research officer of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which helped pay for one study carried out at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in a widely used quote. If successful in large numbers, experts said, the technique has the potential to reverse blindness from other kinds of inherited eye diseases. Many reports then looked at the potential in these results. " I think this is incredibly exciting, " said Jean Bennett, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania and a leader of the Philadelphia study. " It's News focus the beginning of a whole new phase of studies. …