Category Archives: science

The abysmal response of the Salk Institute to accounts of gender discrimination in its midst

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 19, 2017

Last week news broke of a pair of lawsuits filed by two prominent female scientists alleging they had been subject to persistent gender discrimination by The Salk Institute, the storied independent research center in La Jolla, California, where they both work. Wow: NAS member Vicki Lundblad and Professor Katherine Jones are suing @salkinstitute for gender […]

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Replace Francis Collins as NIH Director

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 13, 2016

For decades the NIH has been the premier funding agency in the world, fueling the rise of the US as the undisputed powerhouse of global science. But in his eight years in charge of federal efforts to understand, diagnose and cure disease, current NIH Director Francis Collins has systematically undermined the effectiveness of the institution and overseen […]

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Exploring the relationship between gender and author order and composition in NIH-funded research

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 28, 2016

Last week there was a brief but interesting conversation on Twitter about the practice of “co-first” authors on scientific papers that led me to do some research on the relationship between author order and gender using data from the NIH’s Public Access Policy. I want to note at the outset that this is my first foray […]

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The Imprinter of All Maladies

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 10, 2016

Any sufficiently convoluted explanation for biological phenomena is indistinguishable from epigenetics. Epigenetics is everywhere. Nary a day goes by without some news story or press release telling us something it explains. Why does autism run in families?  Epigenetics. Why do you have trouble losing weight? Epigenetics. Why are vaccines dangerous? Epigenetics. Why is cancer so hard to fight? Epigenetics. Why […]

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I’m Excited! A Post Pre-Print-Posting-Powwow Post

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 18, 2016

I just got back from attending a meeting organized by a new group called ASAPbio whose mission is to promote the use of pre-prints in biology. I should start by saying that I am a big believer in this mission. I have been working for two decades to convince biomedical researchers that the Internet can be more than […]

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The Villain of CRISPR

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 25, 2016
Eric Lander

There is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft. Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to […]

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The current system of scholarly publishing is the real infringement of academic freedom

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 16, 2015

Rick Anderson has a piece on “Open Access and Academic Freedom” at Inside Higher Ed arguing the open access policies being put into place by many research funders and some universities that require authors to make their work available under open licenses (most commonly Creative Commons’ CC-BY) are a violation of academic freedom and should be […]

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Thoughts on Ron Vale’s ‘Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology’

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 15, 2015

Ron Vale has posted a really interesting piece on BioRxiv arguing for changes in scientific publishing. The piece is part data analysis, examining differences in publishing in several journals and among UCSF graduate students from 1980 to today, and part perspective, calling for the adoption of a culture of “pre-prints” in biology, and the expanded […]

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Sympathy for the Devil?

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 14, 2015

My Facebook feed is awash with people standing up for Tim Hunt: “The witch hunt against Tim Hunt is unbearable and disgraceful”, “This is how stupidity turns into big damage. Bad bad bad”, “Regarding the Tim Hunt hysteria”, and so on. Each of these posts has prompted a debate between people who think a social […]

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Ending gender-based harassment in peer review

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 3, 2015

A few days ago Fiona Ingleby, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex (she’s an evolutionary biologist who works on sex-specific behavior and other phenotypes in Drosophila) sent out a series of Tweets reporting on a horrifically sexist review she had received after submitting a paper to PLOS ONE.  Shocking reviewer comments received for our MS on […]

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