Author Archives: Michael Eisen

The HHMI/Wellcome/MPI super journal and the triumph of open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 2, 2011

On Monday the world’s three most prominent private funders of scientific research – the US’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the UK’s Wellcome Trust and Germany’s Max Planck Society – announced plans for a new “top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research”. Basic features of the as of yet unnamed journal (I suggest […]

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Why is Google keeping a list of Jewish names?

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 2, 2011

Google has a new feature – “Something different” – that, according to their description returns “queries that may be in the same category as your original search”. Well, yesterday I entered a colleague’s name – “goldstein” – in to google, and got the following: Hmm. So I tried another search, this time for “Friedman”: So […]

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Announcing The Batavia Open Genomic Data Licence

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 7, 2011

Prepublication release of genomic and other large-scale biological datasets is incredibly value to the research community. For the last decade big genome sequencing centers – backed by the NIH and other funders – have followed a set of principles outlined at a January 2003 meeting in Ft. Lauderdale sponsored by The Wellcome Trust. This so called […]

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Mystery in a children’s classic: Who is the 12th girl at dinner while Madeline is in the hospital?

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 4, 2011

Nearly everyone is familiar with Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans’ classic 1939 children’s tale of the girls in a Parisian boarding school. You will recall that there are 12 of them, and they go about their days in two nice little lines. Always 12 of them, whether they are out and about. Or eating, washing up or […]

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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 22, 2011

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of […]

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Interesting comments from Dennis Overbye about press releases

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 26, 2011

Marketing for scientists has an interview with NYT science reporter Dennis Overbye. In response to a question about whether science reporters can be manipulated, Overbye responded: The easiest way to manipulate the press is to embargo some result and then send a press release about it to a thousand different news organizations.  They will cover it […]

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Press release? We don’t need no stinking press release?

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 24, 2011

I hate press releases – especially around scientific papers. They rarely explain the work clearly, almost always overstate its significance, and are often grossly dishonest. But scientists and their press offices, working in close collaboration with journals, continue churning them, hoping to earn popular press coverage of their latest findings. They go through this unseemly process […]

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Felisa Wolfe-Simon (of arsenic infamy) is no more convincing in person than in print

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 18, 2011

I went to an informal seminar today at Berkeley by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author on the much criticized 2010 Science paper “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus”. I went because, as bad as I thought her paper was, as poorly as I thought she handled concerns expressed about the […]

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Science Magazine really, really, really doesn’t get it

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 22, 2010

Bruce Alberts has an editorial in this weeks science in which he proposes the idea of “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Merit Badges” – a set of “100 different challenges to choose from at each level of schooling” – to engage students, patents and teachers in science. Whether you think this is a good […]

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I know something that Nature does not know… DNA is not lefthanded

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 10, 2010

I’ve written before about Nature’s tendency to publish biologically inaccurate covers. But this one really caught my attention. This is a cover about DNA sequencing, but the structure of the DNA molecule they show is wrong – in a crucial way. DNA is a chiral molecule – meaning it can occur in forms that differ […]

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