The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great surprise uncovered by genome sequencing projects, both in large media outlets and in scientific publications that should have better quality control in place. Eric Lander, writing a Human Genome Project 10th anniversary retrospective in Nature, explains the real surprise about non-coding DNA that was revealed by big omics projects.
About two months ago I was in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, attending the Keystone Symposium on Systems Biology and Regulatory Networks. I went hoping to hear about forward-looking research that deals with some of the most fundamental outstanding questions in biology - fundamental in the sense of being relevant not just to a particular cell type or organism, but to most cells, developmental systems, or biological systems in general.
What I find most exciting about basic molecular biology today is the prospect of building a quantitative understanding of how a cell works. Many other scientists are excited about this as well, leading to the current popularity of what's being called 'systems biology.' The idea is that maybe we can understand the design principles behind a cellular process - how the behavior of a cell emerges from all of those detailed physical interactions among proteins, nucleic acids and other components of the cell. If that sounds vague to you, well, that's because it is vague.
I gripe about the poverty of postdoctoral scientists, but I'd rather be poor and keep my professional integrity than be lavishly paid by drug makers and lose my conscience. The NY Times has a story about psychiatrists who receive payments from drug makers, and who also just happen to have a tendency to frequently prescribe 'atypical drugs' for children with psychiatric problems.
One third of the Republican presidential candidates, when asked in their recent debate whether they believed evolution, admitted that they don't buy it. The blogosphere has already said much about this, and today the NY Times picks up the story.
The NY Times includes this appalling quote by Larry Arnhart, a poli sci professor at Northern Illinois University:
"The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought."
How convenient when science can confirm one's preconceived notions!
According to the NIH, you can't be a systems biologist and an experimental geneticist at the same time. The NIH has issued a call for applications to:
"use systems biology approaches to investigate the mechanisms that underlie genetic determination of complex phenotypes. These projects will combine computational modeling approaches and experimental validation of predictive models."
Last fall I had a chance to hear a presentation by Doug Berg, a microbiologist here at Washington University. Berg's work is a great combination of new technology, genomics and evolution, and it happens to also have potential medical relevance. He's studying the evolution of drug resistance in Helicobacter pylori, a usually benign bacterium that is responsible for stomach ulcers. (Recall that the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded in 2005 to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for their discovery of the link between H.
Tom Friedman, in his Friday's NY Times column (subscription required) comments on Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein and asks:
"If Einstein were alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S. schools, wouldn’t he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?"
Just recently Science published the paper describing the latest primate genome - the rhesus macaque genome. (Check out Science's macaque website for some good (and free) articles on the subject.) Sequencing a large genome like this one is resource intensive (unlike microbial genomes, which are now easily and routinely sequenced), so why did scientists sequence yet another primate genome? In addition to the human genome we already have the chimp genome, and we also have several non-primate mammalian genomes - the mouse, rat, cow, dog, and opossum genomes. Is this a good use of our money?
