[mikeyouse]

I think this is unfair. Scientists often have a narrow-scope breakthrough in an extremely technical area and when they're asked to dumb it down for a wider audience, the tech press / university PR team runs wild. Something like curing diabetes is going to taken hundreds or thousands of small incremental improvements and breakthroughs so when they say "Could lead to a cure!!" they're usually correct but the nuance is often missed.

[vegabook]

There is no excuse for publishing anything that does not stand up to replicability and a significantly high enough threshold chance that published prediction will be realised. Hence the OP is correct in pointing out the unfairness of equating comparatively reliable semiconductor process improvement predictions with the relative dartboard that is biotech.

If third parties ("PR") hijack the truth, it is up to the researcher publicly to denounce them.

If, as I suspect, such denunciation is bad for a researcher's funding, then we have a problem in research, if indeed, in such circumstances, it can even be called research (as opposed to, say, "marketing").

Clearly biotech is a younger field than semiconductors, and it should be given a wide berth to make mistakes without prejudice, but that does not exonerate it from explicitly communicating the expected uncertainty of its results.