The New York Times is fronting a story that combines two of my favorite subjects – DNA and baseball. Unfortunately, the story is ridiculously alarmist, and either willfully or ignorantly conflates DNA paternity/maternity tests with tests designed to extract other information from a person’s genome. The plug for the piece is that Major League Baseball [...]
Nature Method‘s June 2009 issue focuses on “Tools for Drosophila“, complete with a cute little fly on the cover. Unfortunately, it’s not a Drosophila. Instead, it’s a stock photo of a housefly they got from some online database. You’d figure Nature, of all places, would have some Drosophila images lying around?
Research team finds important role for junk DNA by Kitta MacPherson Scientists have called it “junk DNA.” They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature force the genome to carry so much excess baggage? [...] http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S24/28/32C04/index.xml?section=topstories
Also posted in NOT junk |
I get very frustrated every time I see an article about a PLoS article in the popular press that doesn’t include a link to the article. One of our motivations for starting PLoS was to give the public access to the primary research literature, and readers of popular news accounts of one of our articles [...]
Every time I read, hear or write the phrase “spatio-temporal” I cringe. It’s used frequently in developmental biology to convey the idea of measuring or studying something over both space and time. But it is an unusually awkward phrase, being an ugly sounding and looking hyphenation of a prefix “spatio” and adjective “temporal” that are [...]
I just finished watching the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. You could see for a while that it was going to turn out that we were all descendants of the survivors, but I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t see the Hera – mitochondrial eve connection until the raptor swooped over the plains of east [...]
The consolidated appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed into law on Wednesday has a provision that makes the NIH public access policy permanent: [Via THOMAS] Sec. 217. The Director of the National Institutes of Health (`NIH’) shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or [...]
Yuval Levin, former Executive Director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, has an op-ed in Tuesday’s Washington Post arguing that Obama’s new stem cell policy is dangerous. Levin does not argue that stem cell research is bad. Rather he is upset that Obama did not dictate which uses of stem cells are appropriate, but rather asked [...]
Via John Tierney, this video about development is awesome:
I tightened up my earlier response to John Conyers’ letter, and it’s now on the Huffington Post front page. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-eisen/john-conyers-tries-and-fa_b_172944.html
I'm an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies. I am also very interested in promoting various forms of open science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.