Scott Kelly’s medical monitoring has spawned some horrific press coverage

Scott Kelly, here shown giving Ars readers a visual tour of the ISS.

Something very strange happened in the world of science news this week. A month-and-a-half-old press release, which reiterated news that was released in 2017, suddenly spawned a flurry of coverage. To make matters worse, a lot of that coverage repeated claims that range from biologically nonsensical to impossible. So if you've seen any mention of astronaut Scott Kelly's DNA this week, it's probably best if you immediately forget anything you read about it.

How did Scott Kelly's genes end up one of the hottest news stories? I really have no idea. The "news" apparently traces back to a NASA press release that came out on the last day of January. That release uses a lot of words to say that attendees of a recent workshop had agreed that preliminary findings NASA had announced a year earlier were legit. So really, the "news" here is well over a year old. Yet somehow, this release has triggered a geyser of news coverage, at major outlets including CNN, USA Today, and many others.

While this would clearly be an odd situation, it wouldn't be much of a problem if most of the coverage didn't involve a horrific butchering of biology. To understand the story, we have to understand the biology-and why Scott Kelly's journey through space could tell us something about it.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments