Category Archives: science

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 […]

Also posted in science and politics | Comments closed

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 […]

Also posted in science and politics | Comments closed

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). […]

Also posted in science and politics | Tagged , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Also posted in genetics | Comments closed

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 – […]

Also posted in NOT junk | 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 […]

Also posted in open access, science and politics | Comments closed