Author Archives: Michael Eisen

Scientists cynical use of "Junk DNA"

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 4, 2008

This blog – like many others I presume – was started to give me a place to vent about a pet peeve. The target of my particular ire is the way that scientists who should know better continue to tout every new paper on the function of non-coding DNA as a new discovery that – […]

Posted in NOT junk | Comments closed

Open collaboration principles

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 1, 2006

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what the Open Collaboration Principles agreed to by IBM, HP, Intel and Cisco, and seven research universities (including my own UC Berkeley) is all about. It’s being reported in some places as a new statement of support for open source, but that doesn’t seem right to me. The […]

Posted in open access | Comments closed

Science’s culpability in the Hwang Woo Suk affair

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 25, 2005

As willing as I generally am to criticize Science, I was going to give them a pass on the Hawng Woo Suk stem-cell fraud thing, even though his recent Science paper (and possible several others) is looking like the most significant scientific fraud since Piltdown. I’m sure that a post-mortem of the peer review of […]

Posted in science | Comments closed

Fight Intelligent Design – Publish in PLoS!

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 22, 2005

I wrote this Op-Ed in response to the ongoing battles in Kansas, Georgia and Pennsylvania over ‘intelligent design’. The NYT, LAT, Washington Post and the SF Chronicle turned it down. Time to start a blog! Now that a federal judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that intelligent design has no place in the classroom, the scientists […]

Posted in open access, science and politics | Comments closed