Just thought people might get a giggle out of the April fools joke we did saying NIH was cracking down on Brain Doping among scientists which was covered in the Nature article about their survey.
The original post and related posts on the April 1 joke are here .
You can see the Fake NIH Press Release there too.
In addition we created a fake web site for the "World Anti Brain Doping Authority"
More background on the joke is here
Something left out of most of this discussion is that not all sequecing is the same in terms of accuracy and completeness and other measures of quality. The method used here, that of the 454/Roche sequencing has some accuracy issues relative to other sequencing technologies. This is balanced somewhat by some advtantages of 454 sequencing compared to other methods (e.g., no cloning is needed) but the end result is still probably of lower quality than the ABI "Sanger" Capillary methods used for the human genome project.
Each of the new methods also has the pluses and minuses. And in the end, their completeness and quality and accuracy are going to be very important for how useful such genomes are for personalized medicine.
One side aspect of this story is that if you want the blogging world to pick up something about an article you are writing, it is best to publish it in an Open Access journal, preferably one using the Creative Commons license or something like that. I have found that papers I have published in PLoS Biology or other OA journals have a much stronger and longer life in the blogosphere than those in non OA journals. Note - I try to only publish in OA journals but sometimes am thwarted by coauthors.
I agree with Cerebis. The 454 method is not the perfect thing for metagenomics. It is a nice method, and has many pluses but what method you should use comes down to the questions one wants to answer. If all you care about is finding the genes in a collection of microbes, fine, 454 will work well. But if you want to connect genes to organisms and to build up large genomic contigs, well the 454 method does not work well. Give me normal capillary sequencing and I will be much happier, at least for now.
I applaud this and other companies who are releasing more and more of their data. However, lets not get too carried away with glorifying the biotech community for what appears to have been done here. The data release by Novartis and Broad is unusual in that there are few if any restrictions on the use of the data. But most of the other data I have seen from companies is released with so many restrictions on its use that it becomes almost worse to have seen it than not.
Do other countries spy agencies do the same thing?
on
Open Source Spying
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One thing tha was not really discussed in the Times article was whether the same type of "social software" is being used in other countries' spy agencies. And what about international groups like Interpol and NATO. How do they share information that is sensitive and/or secret in some way?
It may seem nice that the Royal Society is doing this. But the free access goes away in December. And after that it is available only to subscribers or for a large fee. This is in contract, for example, with the US National Academies of Science, which makes all their publications available for free after only 6 months. The Royal Society has been fighting the Open Access movement for years and just when it seemed they might move in that direction, they back off . I cannot imagine they will make a lot of money of this archive - so instead of making it easy for people to read these old science articles, they may in the end make it more difficult. What a lame bunch of old farts if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor detail perhaps, but as Academic Editor in Chief of PLoS Biology I want to point out that the paper was in PLoS Biology not PLoS One ...
Just thought people might get a giggle out of the April fools joke we did saying NIH was cracking down on Brain Doping among scientists which was covered in the Nature article about their survey. The original post and related posts on the April 1 joke are here . You can see the Fake NIH Press Release there too. In addition we created a fake web site for the "World Anti Brain Doping Authority" More background on the joke is here
Something left out of most of this discussion is that not all sequecing is the same in terms of accuracy and completeness and other measures of quality. The method used here, that of the 454/Roche sequencing has some accuracy issues relative to other sequencing technologies. This is balanced somewhat by some advtantages of 454 sequencing compared to other methods (e.g., no cloning is needed) but the end result is still probably of lower quality than the ABI "Sanger" Capillary methods used for the human genome project. Each of the new methods also has the pluses and minuses. And in the end, their completeness and quality and accuracy are going to be very important for how useful such genomes are for personalized medicine.
One side aspect of this story is that if you want the blogging world to pick up something about an article you are writing, it is best to publish it in an Open Access journal, preferably one using the Creative Commons license or something like that. I have found that papers I have published in PLoS Biology or other OA journals have a much stronger and longer life in the blogosphere than those in non OA journals. Note - I try to only publish in OA journals but sometimes am thwarted by coauthors.
I agree with Cerebis. The 454 method is not the perfect thing for metagenomics. It is a nice method, and has many pluses but what method you should use comes down to the questions one wants to answer. If all you care about is finding the genes in a collection of microbes, fine, 454 will work well. But if you want to connect genes to organisms and to build up large genomic contigs, well the 454 method does not work well. Give me normal capillary sequencing and I will be much happier, at least for now.
I applaud this and other companies who are releasing more and more of their data. However, lets not get too carried away with glorifying the biotech community for what appears to have been done here. The data release by Novartis and Broad is unusual in that there are few if any restrictions on the use of the data. But most of the other data I have seen from companies is released with so many restrictions on its use that it becomes almost worse to have seen it than not.
One thing tha was not really discussed in the Times article was whether the same type of "social software" is being used in other countries' spy agencies. And what about international groups like Interpol and NATO. How do they share information that is sensitive and/or secret in some way?
Jonathan Eisen
The paper was published in an Open Access journal so you can all browse that if the press release is too basic. Go to http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request =get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010065