Author Archives: Michael Eisen

Ban the phrase “spatio-temporal”

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 1, 2009

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 […]

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R.I.P. Mark Fidrych

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 14, 2009

One of my all-time favorite baseball players – Mark “The Bird” Fidrych – died yesterday. He was one of the first baseball players I remember loving because of how he played, and not because he was on the Red Sox. The weird antics on the mound – he patted the dirt, and talked to the […]

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[WARNING – BSG SPOILER] PopGen’s teachable moment – Hera, mtEve and the fate of the BSG survivors

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 21, 2009

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 […]

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Nature: Big is beautiful

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 18, 2009

Nature has a brief “Research Highlight” on our recent PLoS One paper. Nature 458, 263 (19 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/458263a; Published online 18 March 2009 Genomics: Big is beautiful PLoS ONE 4, e4688 (2009) Finding gene regulators in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster has proved difficult: looking for conserved non-coding DNA sequences, a method that works well in vertebrates, has been […]

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NIH public access policy made “permanent”

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 13, 2009

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 […]

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PLoS and Drosophila Meeting T-shirts

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 11, 2009

A lot of people have asked about getting the various t-shirts I’ve made for PLoS and the Fly Meeting. I’ve posted the images for on zazzle.com if anyone wants a t-shirt of their own (proceeds go to PLoS). create & buy custom products at Zazzle

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Why I hate bioethicists

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 9, 2009

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 […]

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Regulatin’ Genes

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 9, 2009

Via John Tierney, this video about development is awesome:

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Response to Conyers on Huff Po Front Page

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 9, 2009

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

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John Conyers Tries [and Fails] to Explain His Position

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 7, 2009

Lawrence Lessig and I have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary committee and their support for H.R. 801 – a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy that makes all works published as part of NIH funded research freely available to the public online. On Friday, […]

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