Author Archives: Michael Eisen

2 UC chancellors, 2 police assaults, no coincidence

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 21, 2011

I teach at UC Berkeley and my brother teaches at UC Davis, so I’ve been a bit preoccupied trying to figure out why our two campuses have all of a sudden become ground zero in the institutional repression of student speech. Is it some kind of accident that both Berkeley’s Chancellor Birgeneau and Davis’s Chancellor Katehi […]

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Channeling George Wallace: Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s Disgraceful Doublespeak

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 11, 2011

One of the surest signs that someone is up to no good is when they take something in plain sight and try to tell you that it is something else. Take, for example, this video from this weeks Occupy Cal protest: I’ve watched this over and over. And every time I watch it, I see […]

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Berkeley’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Response to #occupycal

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 10, 2011

Yesterday, a group of UC Berkeley students, working under the banner of “Occupy Cal”, sought to set up an encampment in the middle of UC Berkeley’s campus to highlight the connection between the banking industry, the global financial crisis, and the financial plight of our public universities. I didn’t participate in the protests (it’s not my […]

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My pumpkins

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 30, 2011
Posted in misc stuff | Comments closed

Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 28, 2011

Peer review is ostensibly one of the central pillars of modern science. A paper is not taken seriously by other scientists unless it is published in a “peer reviewed” journal. Jobs, grants and tenure are parceled out, in no small part, on the basis of lists of “peer reviewed” papers. The public has been trained […]

Posted in baseball, open access, PLoS, publishing, science | Comments closed

PLoS Won

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 25, 2011

When Pat Brown, Harold Varmus and I started the Public Library of Science (PLoS) 10 years ago with the goal of making the scientific and medical literature a universally freely available resource, most people in the science publishing industry dismissed us as naive idealists who didn’t understand that publishing is a business that has to […]

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Zelda (the coolest transcription factor ever) is a master regulator of embryonic adolescence

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 20, 2011

PLoS Genetics just published a paper from my lab describing our analysis of the binding and activity of a remarkable protein, known as Zelda, that appears to be a master regulator of genome activation in the earliest stages of Drosophila development, and thereby plays a major role in shaping the form and function of the mature […]

Posted in cool science, evolution, gene regulation, genetics, My lab, science | Comments closed

Arsenic, quasicrystals and the myth of the science martyr

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 13, 2011

The story is straight out of Hollywood: an ambitious scientist makes a startling discovery that runs counter to everything that is supposed to be true in their field. Their initial announcement is met with near universal skepticism that quickly turned to scorn, earning them outright hostility from several prominent scientists. They are even kicked out […]

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Notebook S1: Scientific publishing awesomeness

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 26, 2011

Greg Lang and David Botstein have a paper in PLoS One this week probing the consequences of disrupting the cluster of GAL genes in the yeast genome. The paper is cool. But the supplemental material is awesome. This description in the text says it all: Notebook S1. The complete laboratory notebook detailing the strain constructions […]

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The destructive myopia of the NIH study on grant funding and race

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 25, 2011

Last week Science published a paper describing the results of an NIH-sponsored investigation into the impact of a scientist’s race on the probability of that their grants will be funded. The findings were striking: After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find […]

Posted in politics, race, science, science and culture | Comments closed