© 1998 by Oxford University Press
For some scientists, it has become an all-too-familiar scenario -- months in an all-out sprint with a rival group to isolate a disease gene, your team's victory, the press release -- and then the moment of triumph is boiled down to a two-sentence blurb in the B section of a newspaper.
In the late 1990s, cloning a gene is clearly no longer the fodder for media frenzy that it was in the 1980s. Today, most gene discoveries seemingly go unnoticed by the press, or those that do garner some attention often are so condensed on the back pages of the newspaper that the scientific implications of the The Rise and Fall of The Front-Page Gene