It appears to be on mice only in the 5th paragraph, and the sole photo is of a patient (before it is said to be on mice). Sarcasm/negativity is a normal reaction when you spot an ad for a local university with a random research with especially touches most of us. It is not so hard to be honest and support honest research and these respectable advances without such tricks.

No.

The title is clickbait. It claims there is an effective treatment for ALS.

It is so bogus. In mice should be added to the title.

Thank you, GP, for the “in mice” comment. In this case it was absolutely crucial for me getting what was going on.

The warning is 100% correct. What works in mice only works in humans about 20% of the time and it's even smaller that it works without toxicity or adverse effects in humans even then. So eagerly expecting a human treatment is irrational and pollyanna.

Typically it's 10-20 years after animal studies such as mice or monkeys before you can expect doctors to have it available. And that's assuming everything work just right.

This is the same mistake MANY people make when some new wonder-technology is announced from university labs - it's another 20 years before an economically viable product that actually is available to consumers will be appearing. It's often called the "20 year rule". New battery technology could solve green energy? But it's just a lab discovery? Nope. Not anytime soon!!

I recently did a study of this for penicillin: it was almost exactly 20 years from Fleming discovering it to when consumers could get it from their doctors or hospitals post-WW2!

Transistors didn't start to eclipse vacuum tubes in consumer electronics until 20 years after the invention of the transistor (1948 to early 1970s). Same for integrated circuits - 20 years before the Silicon Valley boom took off (1959 to mid-to-late 1970s) and consumers started to benefit with PCs.

Not really low effort if it points out a huge problem in the world of scientific journalism...

The article stated exactly the limitations of the experiment. It was conducted with mice and only mice with a less common form of ALS.

I'd say the problem is less with journalism in this instance, and more-so with peoples limited attention spans.

The article didn't even name the drug. It's a terrible article.

It's a problem with the title.

My point regarding attention span stands. The title could certain do with improvement, but people should not be consuming their news of the basis of titles.

I do because most articles are crap. The comments are simply better quality. For example, I was able to tell in 2 seconds that this was on mice from reading the comments and so that I don't care about the article.

Quite often comments are wrong, top-rated comments are often reflective of bombastic conclusions arrived at (and upvoted) by people who had not read the article.

The first page of HN has thirty articles. I can't read all of them. I don't recognize the author's names, so I can't judge by that. The number of comments does not tell me if I will be interested in the article. The title is all I have to go on.

Admittedly, I should probably assume that anything relating to Alzheimer's or Parkinson's has an implicit "(in mice)" tag.

Isn't this more of a problem with HN guidelines for submitting articles than anything else?

If someone reads the article, they see where it says this is in a mouse model of an uncommon form of ALS.

Yes. There are lots of problems with the HN "guidelines," not least of which that they're actually rules you get punished for breaking and not "guidelines" you can choose not to follow.

Low effort, but high information density.