The DNA Network |
| More Airport Dinosaurs - Denver This Time [The Tree of Life] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 04:40 PM CDT Well, a few days ago I wrote with excitement about the dinosaur fossil in the Chicago Airport that I saw on the way to the ASM Meeting. Something about evolution in public is always a good thing. And then, amazingly, on the way home, while waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, I had a dinosaur moment there too. In Denver, there was some floor art that was some small embedded sculptures (mostly of dinosaurs) in the floor in the terminal. Maybe there is something I do not know here --- do all airports have to have something about dinosaurs? |
| Feed readers: Above 500! [ScienceRoll] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 03:53 PM CDT It’s a big day for Scienceroll because it has more than 500 feed readers from today. I’m so happy this number is still growing and I really hope you like what I write about here. If you would like to hear more about these topics:
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| A great vegetarian recipe from Raoul and Pam [Tomorrow's Table] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 03:49 PM CDT Raoul and I included several recipes in our book Tomorrow's Table. Amazon posted one of these on the product page for the book. I would attach it here, if I only knew how. Instead, here I append an excerpt from the book that describes how we prepare this recipe and explains why some of the ingredients are GE and some are certified organic. First, we generally eat as much as possible from the farm basket Raoul brings home every few days. We like the variety, freshness, and ease that comes from eating off the farm. At home on weekdays, we like to prepare the food quickly, and we want it to be colorful (we figure if there are a variety of colors on the plates, then we are getting enough vitamins) and tasty. The tofu is made from certified organic soybeans that are processed into the familiar white square blocks in a factory a few miles away. After I finish preparing the tofu, I turn on the stove to high and pour in a few tablespoons of olive oil. The oil is not certified organic but it was on sale and locally made. The low cost appeals to me and so does eating locally grown foods because it supports our neighboring farmers. The olive oil is definitely not GE because there are no GE olives on the market. Despite this fact, the label on the bottle says "GE-free." It is a hopeful marketing ploy that is often seen at our local food co-op where many consumers associate GE with massive farms, pesticide runoff, and high fertilizer use. Yet genetic engineering is not the cause of these types of farms. The industrialization of agriculture, with the associated high inputs of pesticides and fertilizers, proceeded quite contentedly for years before the advent of GE, fueled mainly by governmental agricultural policies that do not put high priority on social and environmental costs. Ironically, much of the food labeled "GE-free" may have been imported from afar, grown with toxic pesticides, or be less nutritious than the local fare. In contrast, food that is GE may be locally grown without pesticides, and someday, be more nutritious than crops grown from non-GE seed. I pull out another pan, turn a burner to high, pour in some more oil and plop down two of Micaela's corn tortillas, made in a factory ten miles north of here. The ingredients are simple: corn, water, and salt. The corn is not certified organic and the tortillas likely contain trace amounts of Bt protein. We choose them because these are the best tasting tortillas around and they are produced close by our home. It seems to me that these tortillas made from corn from Bt-corn plants fit well within the ecological farming framework we try to support. First, the global environment is being spared more than a hundred million pounds of much more toxic pesticides each year. Second, the tortillas likely contain reduced amounts of mycotoxins as compared to tortillas made from conventional or organic corn. In California's Central Valley, food is abundant, and it is fairly easy to figure out what to eat, especially if you are not overly concerned about the presence of GE ingredients. If there is meaning to be found in each meal, it is not about how the food was genetically modified, but in the freshness of ingredients, the health of the farm workers, the impact on the environment, and the mood and gratitude of the diners. We hope you enjoy the recipe. |
| GINA, The Good News: Engaging the Public [PredictER Blog] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 02:14 PM CDT This is the third post in a series of posts in which I share what I see as the ups and downs of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA or H.R. 493). In this post I address a potential positive: A little discussed portion of GINA may be cause for celebration. Title II, Section 208, Subsection (b) of GINA calls for the establishment of the Genetic Nondiscrimination Study Commission after GINA has been enacted for six years. The purpose of the Commission is to evaluate the status of genetic science, genetic discrimination, public perception, and other factors, and to make recommendations to Congress regarding possible future legislation. Here, it would seem as though Congress has exercised a reasonable amount of foresight. Scientific knowledge is expanding at an amazing rate; faster than society and its laws can react, resulting in public fear and apprehension. Public fears are important and they must be listened to; public fears shouldn't always determine legislative action, but they cannot be brushed aside or ignored. In this case, Congress seemed to understand this dichotomy. They did the research. They listened to experts, and they acted. – Sam Beasley |
| GINA, The Bad News: Adverse Selection [PredictER Blog] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 02:11 PM CDT This is the second post in a series of posts in which I share what I see as the ups and downs of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA or H.R. 493). Although the legislation will hopefully do much to encourage research and protect predictive health patients, GINA is not all roses. The legislation has numerous critics who have good reasons to be critical. For starters, it sets the stage for adverse selection to occur in the health insurance industry. Adverse selection happens when an information gap emerges between the beneficiary and the insurer; if the beneficiary knows much more than the insurer, then the insurer is unable to accurately assess the beneficiary's risk. This information imbalance results in more claims being made than the insurer reasonably predicted. GINA facilitates this phenomenon by allowing beneficiaries access to genetic information, but denying it to insurers. If, for example, a beneficiary finds out from a genetic test that he has a significantly increased risk of developing prostate cancer, he would use that information in deciding whether or not to purchase insurance, but the insurer would be unaware of that increased risk in deciding in which group the individual should be placed, what rate he should be charged, etc. This is potentially a big problem in the insurance industry, because insurers need to be able to accurately determine risk in order to prevent claims exceeding predicted levels. In the long run, inaccurate risk predictions in the industry will result in rate hikes, and rate hikes will drive healthier participants out of groups. In a the worst case scenario, this could start a downward spiral in the direction of group or insurer insolvency. - Sam Beasley |
| “The Pornography of Medicine” [Think Gene] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 07:56 AM CDT After Kevin published that trash HIV study, I’ve been thinking about the usefulness of research against the unrelenting pressure to pass nothing as something. This is something we think about a lot here at Think Gene. I stumbled upon The Last Psychiatrist while procrastinating sending a mail to everyone about news.thinkgene.com (hint, use it) who, uninspired by a clinical trail in the New England Journal, writes about the worthless self-posturing of research and its underlying psychological motivations. From The Pornography of Medicine:
I don’t think we here at Think Gene make any effort to mask our perpetual existential angst about everything from education to research to scientific careers. I assume this reflects our youth and unstable situations. We don’t have fancy biographies in the about section because we don’t have anything to say, we have nothing to lose by attacking what others overlook to preserve their careers, and we have everything to gain by pursuing ventures of unknown value. (like a blog) I don’t know if that makes Think Gene better or worse, but our traffic has been growing steady to the tune of several thousand uniques every day, and we seem to be more popular according to standard metrics than many much more authoritative, better-funded biology websites. I don’t know what we’re doing to make us successful other than I’m a decent hacker and writer and Josh is a decent molecular biologist —and we both spend way too much time on the Internet. But we are committed to building something really great and useful, and we need your help. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or general advice for young people to hurl down at us from atop some pillar of success (please, no pillars of asceticism), we would be much obliged. See, this is what happens when you read psychology with an open license to publish anything on whim. |
| DNA Video: Illumina on Wallstrip [Eye on DNA] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 03:00 AM CDT Interesting little summary on the history of Illumina.
via business|bytes|genes|molecules |
| Upgrading to Hardy Heron [Mailund on the Internet] Posted: 07 Jun 2008 02:59 AM CDT A few days ago I was too tired to work in the evening, so I decided to upgrade my laptop to Hardy Heron while watching a movie. It went surprisingly well, compared to last time where the upgrade broke a lot of my applications (but my last upgrade was to a beta release of Gutsy Gibbon and this time I didn’t want to upgrade to a beta). So far, I am happy with the update. I have had some problems with spam-filtering but as far as I can see I have solved that problem just by changing from bogofiltering to spamassasin, so no worries there.
It is a feature I would really love to have, so I’ll try to fix it, but if anyone has had similar problems (broken sync or problems with recurring events) and solved them, please let me know. I am very happy with Firefox 3 as well. It is less memory hungry and the URL bar is awesome! |
| A science blogger on Science writing about a science blog ... [The Tree of Life] Posted: 06 Jun 2008 10:08 PM CDT Sorry - just had to make up that little title because I had a funny conversaiton with someone where I was trying to say, concisely, that Ryan Gregory, who has a nice blog called Genomicron, had blogged about how Science Magazine had written an article where they referenced my blog about "Genomics by Press Release." But I was tired and it did not come out so well when I said "A science blogger wrote about science blogging and how Science wrote about my blog". And the person just stared at me. Anyway, all I know now is that it is a lot easier to talk about when Nature writes about "science" blogging |
| The Open Science Web [business|bytes|genes|molecules] Posted: 06 Jun 2008 09:48 PM CDT David Recordon has a nice, optimistic post about the Open Web. I have long felt that the web is the ultimate platform, and the past few years have only strengthened this opinion, as we make the web more programmable and start leveraging it as a multi-way communication medium (in conjunction with such technologies as XMPP). Much of the tech community is focused on leveraging this web around social networks. My hope is that we in the scientific community can take this to the next level, literally connecting data and information first and then the people. We are producers and consumers of data. The data lies in our labs, in our papers, in central repositories, on web sites and services; a mishmash of static and dynamic data of all types. We use these data to derive information and hypotheses. Call me conceited but as a scientific community we are probably the stewards of a decent, important, chunk, of the worlds collective intelligence. Except that now we have the ability to bring a distributed collective intelligence to life. What do we need?
Aside: After meeting Matt Wood, discussions with Pawel over time, and seeing the activity over on FriendFeed, I am even more optimistic that we can have an impact as a community of like minded geeks with a diversity of interests and skills. Technorati Tags: Open Web, Open Science, Bursty Work  |
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