Author Archives: Michael Eisen

A Nobel for GFP

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 8, 2008

Congrats to Roger Tsien for winning a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. Tsien was honored for unraveling the mechanisms of green fluorescent protein (GFP), and more importantly for developing a dizzying array of GFP variants that work more efficiently and emit different colors of light. It’s particularly exciting to see scientists rewarded […]

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Commercial Ascendance of Open Access – Springer buys BioMed Central

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 7, 2008

The long-rumored sale of BioMed Central – the first true open access publisher – has finally been consumated. I am sure some will lament the sale of the innovative BMC to a publishing behemoth, but this is an unambiguously good thing for open access. This proves what we at PLoS have been saying since we […]

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Tij to head HHMI

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 30, 2008

HHMI just announced that my Berkeley colleague Robert Tjian (Tij to everyone) is going to be the new president of HHMI. As I am now an employee of HHMI, I was quite interested in the search to replace Tom Cech – and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the result. Tij is a fantastic scientist […]

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Crayons on a Kindle?

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 25, 2008
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Well, at least someone asked about evolution

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 24, 2008

Barack Obama’s answers to 18 science questions posed by Nature were just published (John McCain declined to answer, although Nature answered many of these questions from his public statements). These questions were much more pointed and science-related than the ones posed by Science Debate 2008. For example, they asked: Many scientists are bitter about what […]

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Contest: If you could ask a single science question at the real presidential debate

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 16, 2008

What would it be? I am so disappointed in the much hyped Science Debate 2008. As I said before, I read the questions before the answers and found them to be really lame. And the answers to these overly general and often unsciency questions were predictably uninteresting. The candidates support science! Yay! But did anyone […]

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Science Debate 2008 questions are really lame

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 15, 2008

Most of you have probably heard about Science Debate 2008, an effort “to restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue” by having the candidates discuss pressing issues in science. Since Obama and McCain won’t have an actual debate, the organizers of this effort have posed 14 questions (culled from 3,400 submissions from the community). […]

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Congressional testimony on NIH Public Access repeal effort

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 12, 2008

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings today on the newly introduced “Fair Copyright and Research Works Act (H.R. 6845),” which is a publisher-promoted effort to repeal the NIH Public Access Policy. Peter Suber’s Open Access News discusses the hearings here and here. Karen Rustad at Little Green River has a great post about the hearing. […]

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Identifying individuals in "anonymous" genetic studies

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 10, 2008

Most people who participate in genetic studies do so with the expectation that their participation – and more importantly their phenotype – will be anonymous. To preserve this anonymity, raw data (individual’s genotypes and phenotypes) are not made publicly available. However, to enable validation and further research, pooled data – the average allele frequencies in […]

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Legislative threat to NIH public access policy

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 9, 2008

Two Democratic congressmen (Howard Berman or CA-28 and John Conyers, Jr. of MI-14) are planning to introduce a bill into the US House of Representatives that would effectively kill the NIH Public Access Policy. They are responding to complaints (and donations) from the American Association of Publishers (the lobbying wing of the journal publishers). The […]

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