Author Archives: Michael Eisen

Darwin’s Tangled Bank in verse

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 3, 2012

My daughter has to memorize a poem for a school performance, and asked me if I knew a good poem about nature. There are, of course, many good ones, but I really wanted her to have the most poetic thing ever written about nature – the last paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species – rendered […]

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Is the NIH a cult?

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 29, 2012

As many of you know, I spent a fair amount of time last month engaged in debates about the wisdom of California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated the labeling of genetically modified foods. While many of these discussions were civil, one particularly energetic fellow accuse me of having been brainwashed by the “cult of […]

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Prop 37 and the Right to Know Nothing

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 17, 2012

As we approach election day, my neighborhood in Berkeley has sprouted dozens of blue and orange yard signs supporting Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified foods. The “Right to Know” has become the rallying cry of the initiative’s backers, who meet any criticism of the initiative, its motivation or of the […]

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Science is healthy for children and other living things

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 3, 2012
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Retraction action, what’s your faction: the dangers of citation worship

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 28, 2012

If you ask scientists to list words they are most afraid to hear associated with their work, I suspect “retraction” would rank high on the list. Retraction is a kind of death sentence, applied only when papers contain serious methodological errors or were tainted by fraud. So the recent retraction of a PLoS Pathogens paper […]

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Blinded by Big Science: The lesson I learned from ENCODE is that projects like ENCODE are not a good idea

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 10, 2012

When the draft sequence of the human genome was finished in 2001, the accomplishment was heralded as marking the dawn of the age of “big biology”. The high-throughput techniques and automation developed to sequence DNA on a massive scale would be wielded to generate not just genomes, but reference data sets in all areas of […]

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A neutral theory of molecular function

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 7, 2012

In 1968 Motoo Kimura published a short article in Nature in which he argued that “most mutations produced by nucleotide replacement are almost neutral in natural selection”. This fantastic paper is generally viewed as having established the “neutral theory” of molecular evolution, whose central principle was set out by Jack King and Lester Jukes in a Science paper the […]

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This 100,000 word post on the ENCODE media bonanza will cure cancer

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 6, 2012

It is oddly fitting that the papers describing the results of the NIH’s massive $200m ENCODE project were published in the midst of political convention season. For this was no typical scientific publication, but a carefully orchestrated spectacle, meant to justify a massive, expensive undertaking, and to convince us that we are better off now […]

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The Glacial Pace of Change in Scientific Publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 31, 2012

I was excited today when my Twitter stream started lighting up with links to an article titled “The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing: Why It Hurts Everyone and What We Can Do To Fix It“. Sounded right up my alley. I was even more excited when I clicked and saw that it was written by […]

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Senators Boxer and Sanders fill Agriculture Bill with anti-GMO nonsense

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 13, 2012

Anastasoa Bodnar alerted me on Twitter to the following amendment to the Farm Bill which would have authorized states to require the labeling of genetically modified foods. As I’ve said before, I’m not opposed to providing consumers with accurate information about what they’re eating (emphases on accurate). But I am saddened to see this amount of […]

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