Category Archives: science

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 […]

Also posted in ENCODE, NOT junk, science and politics | Tagged | Comments closed

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 […]

Also posted in ENCODE, evolution, gene regulation, genetics, NOT junk | Comments closed

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 […]

Also posted in ENCODE, NOT junk, publishing | Comments closed

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 […]

Also posted in publishing | Comments closed

How President Obama could really lead on open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 8, 2012

[The Washington Post ran a nice op-ed today from two student leaders linked to the recent public access petition campaign. I had submitted one that urges the administration to take a more agressive stance, which I am posting here.] Last weekend, a “We the People” petition calling on the Obama administration to provide free access […]

Also posted in publishing, science and politics | Comments closed

The anti-GMO campaign’s dangerous war on science

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 1, 2012

This November, Californians will vote on an initiative that would require any food containing ingredients derived from genetically modified crops to be labeled as such. Backers of the “California Right To Know Genetically Engineered Food Act” are pitching it as a matter of providing information to consumers, who, they argue, “have a right to know […]

Also posted in GMO, science and politics, war on science | Comments closed

The triumph of fake open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 23, 2012

It’s been a heady day for “open access”. A petition urging the Obama administration to extend the NIH’s public access policy to other government agencies blew past the halfway point in its goal to gather 25,000 signatures. And the faculty senate at UCSF voted to approve an “open access” policy that would “require” its faculty to […]

Also posted in open access | Comments closed

What the UC “open access” policy should say

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 3, 2012

The joint faculty senate of the ten campuses of the University of California has floated a trial balloon “open access” policy. I, of course, laud the effort to move the ball forward on open access, but the proposed policy falls short in two key ways. 1) The rights reserved by the University are too limited. […]

Also posted in open access, PLoS, publishing | Comments closed

20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 1, 2012

When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice. So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional publishers […]

Also posted in open access, publishing | Comments closed

The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 24, 2012

Much is being made of a recent letter from Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council on the Library to the campus community announcing their conclusion that: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable Judging from many of the responses, people seem […]

Also posted in open access | Comments closed