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Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

664 points · 258 comments · emigre

  1. itvision · · focus · HN ↗
    What a way to oversell the discovery.

    The reality is:

        * Different brain regions have different functions: ancient knowledge.
    * Different regions contain distinct cell types and molecular programs: also well established.
    * Anterior and posterior brain structures may trace back to fundamentally separate progenitor lineages that were independently specified very early in evolution and development: that's the interesting new result.
    The headline should have been: "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" - not that we have "two organs" in the brain.
    1. xg15 · · focus · HN ↗
      > "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages"

      I'd have never clicked that headline nor understood why this finding is important.

      If you think the original headline is not "truthful" enough, at least do something like "Researchers found the reason why hindbrain cells cannot be grown in a lab and found a way to overcome it"

      > not that we have "two organs" in the brain.

      Depends what the definition of "organ" actually is. What speaks for different organs here is that the cells both have a different pathway from stem cells and have different evolutionary histories. That is different from other brain regions that may have separate functions but still evolved together.

      1. baxtr · · focus · HN ↗
        Saying the truth and communicating well are orthogonal. You can do both.
        1. DrewADesign · · focus · HN ↗
          But there’s rarely one correct answer. Conveying the same approximate message to multiple types of readers is extremely difficult in a handful of words. People with subject matter knowledge are annoyed by headlines written for laypeople that don’t know the jargon or have a mental model of the important concepts that jargon represents. They always seem to miss important distinctions, make poor analogies, or the like. Headline-length blurbs that successfully convey those things to the knowledgeable are often utterly opaque to laypeople causing them to ignore articles about topics they’d find interesting. The only option is trying to estimate the subject matter expertise of the audience, and despite many people in the tech world assuming their software knowledge gives them technical expertise in many non-software fields, the layperson headline is absolutely the best approach here.
          1. jamesrcole · · focus · HN ↗
            Not one bit of that justifies actively misleading people. Which is what that headline does.
            1. DrewADesign · · focus · HN ↗
              I think that’s an exaggeration. Oversimplification? Poor analogy? Sure. Deliberately misleading? I don’t see it.
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