A quick scan of recent news headlines, like NBC’s “Researchers Say Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA May Be Hidden in His Letters and Artwork,” might suggest that a groundbreaking discovery has taken place. In another article, CNN reported that: “The team uncovered […] a matching sequence of Y chromosomes from a male,” genetic material that gets passed down virtually unchanged from father to son. 

But later in that same article, they emphasized that the paper’s findings have yet to be peer-reviewed and instead are part of a pre-print article by the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, made available online on January 6 by bioRxiv. 

Despite appearances, the Da Vinci Code has yet to be solved. 

Has da Vinci’s DNA been found in his artwork? 

In the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project’s pre-print, Harinder Singh and his colleagues reveal that most of the retrieved DNA belongs to a clade known as E1b1b. This clade, a broad genetic grouping of people, is from around the Mediterranean, including central and southern Italy, notably the same area that da Vinci hailed from: Vinci, Italy. 

Today, this group is so widespread that this finding alone does not prove the DNA came from da Vinci himself; instead, the sample is likely a mix of artifact-related DNA and modern contamination, from handling by researchers. 

Even so, news outlets frame this pre-print of a study — the non peer-reviewed version of a research paper — as fact, but with an asterisk attached. In contrast to pre-prints, peer-reviewed articles are assessed in multiple rounds, for content, methodology, and data to be established as fact; a lengthy task for referees. 

In isolation, this case may seem harmless, but science sensationalism, the practice of dramatizing facts to attract media attention, poses numerous concerns. Presenting scientific information to the public in a misleading way creates misinformation and ignorance. 

To avoid these challenges, science must be reported with greater accuracy. But who is to blame for the media landscape we exist in today? Media outlets, confined within the fast-paced news cycle, who propagate ‘bad science’? Or researchers, who create knowledge that fuels and shapes the ‘attention economy’? 

Science sensationalism

The Leonardo da Vinci Project’s case isn’t an outlier. NASA and Science similarly found themselves in hot water after a research article, entitled “A bacterium that can grow on arsenic instead of phosphorus,” was published in Science on December 2, 2010. In their paper, Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute claimed that arsenic-based life was possible; much to the surprise of the scientific community. 

Positing that arsenic, which is highly toxic, could replace an element as essential to life as phosphorus provoked scrutiny from other experts in the field. In every documented instance — until the Wolfe-Simon article — phosphorus was critical to important biomolecules. Biomolecules include nucleic acids, which are building blocks that make up larger structures like DNA. 

Meanwhile, the media celebrated this feat of scientific discovery as charting a course for a whole new area of research, with headlines like: “Arsenic-loving bacteria may help in hunt for alien life.” In an interview with Science, Wolfe-Simon admitted that she and her colleagues could have waited to publish their findings until they had done the due scientific process. 

As of July 24, 2025, Science retracted the article after they “continued to receive media inquiries about the Wolfe-Simon Research Article,” prompting mixed opinions among scientific experts. 

This instance exposes a deeper issue, beyond the individual egos of researchers and research institutions: science’s publishing problem. 

Scientific journals, including Science, are motivated to increase the speed and amount of papers that are published due to article processing charges (APCs), a fee paid by the authors of an article during the publication process. APCs allow journals to bypass traditional subscription costs by imparting the financial burden on the author, rather than the reader, while meeting their own financial ends. 

Meanwhile, scientists are dependent on publishing in prestigious, high-impact journals to ensure a prolific career. Generally, impact scores serve as a proxy for the quality of papers within that journal, where high impact means high quality. 

Media sensationalism

Clearly, the media played a role in shaping this arsenic-loving bacteria discovery. In the BBC’s reporting, they shared that “[t]he first organism able to substitute one of the six chemical elements crucial to life has been found,” despite the poor evidence presented in the Wolfe-Simon study. This was a misleading and even irresponsible act. 

In 2015, John Bohannon, a science journalist and biologist, felt that reporters were at fault for bad science and the sensationalized headline epidemic. In response, he decides to pull an elaborate prank — and humiliates the media in turn. Bohannon’s claim? Chocolate can act as a weight loss accelerator. 

To expose poor scientific practice in nutrition research, Peter Onnekan and Diana Löbl, a pair of German documentary filmmakers, contacted Bohannon to set up a clinical trial with just 15 participants. Statistically, the small sample size alone is sure to provide unreliable results. When coupled with measuring a large number of factors — weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well being, etc. — a study is likely to generate false positives, which occur when a scientist wrongly determines that something is true. 

After the International Archives of Medicine, an APC-based journal that failed to carry out a peer review of the study’s findings, published their research, the group presented their too-good-to-be-true press release to the media, who publicized the results, with almost no verification or fact checking. 

Critics of Bohannon’s unorthodox methods cite the study as unethical, since many readers may remain unaware that the study was a hoax. However, this criticism further serves the argument that journalists, in conjunction with scientists, are responsible for the volatile mix of bad science and bad journalism. 

When it comes to newsworthy discoveries, especially health-related ones, media headlines have real consequences. Bohannon summed up the stakes perfectly, in a 2015 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review: “If scientists do junk science and nobody ever hears about it, then nobody is harmed. It’s one thing when a British tabloid tells us about research saying there are dinosaurs on Mars. But there are so many people who [are in] need of diet interventions.”

Reconciling science and journalism 

The blame for today’s contemporary science-media landscape is often divided between the view that scientists should be more transparent and the belief that journalists should be better equipped to report on scientific research. In reality, it seems that responsibility could be attributed in multiple directions: researchers, reporters, scientific institutions, and media organizations. 

But the perception that all science journalism is dubious paints an unfair picture of the news. As David F. Ransoff and Richard M. Ransoff pointed out in their 2001 paper on science sensationalism, most reporting of scientific research is nuanced. Unfortunately, sensationalized cases tend to receive far more attention than routine, accurate reporting, eroding public trust. 

There isn’t one obvious path forward to fixing the issue of science sensationalism. It is imperative, however, that science and journalism continue to collaborate. 

Without researchers creating new scientific knowledge, there would be no scientific journalism. 

And without a way to communicate, even the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries are of little value.