Musical interlude: Carl Sagan’s ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking
A still more glorious dawn awaits.. not a sunrise.. but a galaxy rise...
Why data-sharing policies matter
A few weeks ago, the journal PNAS published a paper "PKNOX2 gene is significantly associated with substance dependence in European-origin women”. Unfortunately, the paper inappropriately used embargoed data. In this issue PNAS discusses the fallout of this screwup, and how they dealt with it:
Although the scientific community is often viewed as self-correcting, the system failed for this paper. It appears that not all of the coauthors were aware of the embargo agreement, and the referees and the editors did not know that a serious breach of scientific conduct and NIH policy had taken place. This oversight does a disservice to the SAGE investigators on this National Human Genome Research Institute-funded genetic study of addiction, the other investigators who abided by the NIH embargo, and the scientific community.
The retraction is followed up by an interesting essay on why data-sharing policies matter:
Data from biomedical research are more broadly available to the research community today than in the past. Technical developments, such as web-based databases, have played a role in this transition, but so has a fundamental shift in the view of who “owns” research data. The model of the investigator owning data has been increasingly replaced by one in which society owns data.
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Wide access to data benefits the research community and society. We must all play an active role in protecting the rights of both research participants and principal investigators if this important practice is to flourish.
The Phantom of Heilbronn and DNA testing.
Oops:
Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the "phantom of Heilbronn", the woman was dubbed by police as the country's most dangerous woman. Investigators had connected her to six murders and an unsolved death based on DNA traces found at the scene.
Bioinformatics: the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated
Lincoln Stein updates his 2003 prediction that bioinformatics would be dead in ten years:
In February 2003 I gave a keynote address for the second annual O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called 'Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012' in which I predicted that bioinformatics as a discipline separate from mainstream biology would be gone in ten years. My talk was met with resentment, disappointment and stunned disbelief by an audience of computer geeks who had come to the conference for the express purpose of getting in on the hot new thing. Worse, this was the year in which biotech and pharma realized they had significantly overinvested in bioinformatics and started large-scale layoffs. In the light of a downsized bioinformatics market, the O'Reilly publishing house cancelled a series of planned bioinformatics textbooks, and never sponsored another Bioinformatics Technology Conference. It seemed as though my predictions had come true ten years early, and although I knew it was all coincidental, I couldn't suppress the sinking feeling that I was the villain who triggered the collapse.
we’re now entering the postwar phase of reconstruction—the scientific equivalent of nation-building
Chris Mooney in Slate says that the "war on science" is over... but now what?
Scientists are ecstatic about (...) Obama's recent promise to listen to them "even when it's inconvenient—especially when it's inconvenient." But it would be the gravest of errors for researchers to simply return victorious to their labs and fall back on a time-honored stance of political detachment. If the war on science is over, we're now entering the postwar phase of reconstruction—the scientific equivalent of nation-building.
The importance of stupidity in Scientific research
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.