Two years back, the US Congress passed the NIH Reform Act of 2006 in an effort to get the NIH to adapt its structure to the new landscape of biomedical research, and to institute more transparency and accountability so that Congress can do its job. Last week, the NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni went to Congress to report on how well his agency has done meeting the new demands of the law. He lays out the challenge in today's interdisciplinary world:

I usually like Nicolas Wade, but this very first sentence of a piece in this week's NY Times science section is not right:

The principal rationale for the $3 billion spent to decode the human genome was that it would enable the discovery of the variant genes that predispose people to common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last Friday. The NY Times has an appraisal here. No more novels with inimitable passages like this:

Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine's broken down into benzoylecgonine, methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and one reason not everybody is wired to enjoy Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield unpleasant neurosomatic fallout in certain systems:...In former cokehead Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that led directly to his early choice of career.

Today's Sunday Times reflects on the Western state of mind. The piece resonated with me, having grown up in an Eastern Ivy League town, but also having lived for seven years in three different Western states. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's University of Idaho credentials come up (and no, this post is not about politics or Sarah Palin!):

The governor’s supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Ms. Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Mr. Obama got his degrees.

The University of Idaho is a bad choice to illustrate this point,

Razib at Gene Expression and Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish discuss science vs. scientists. Razib:

I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the above should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool's errand only results in glorious foolery.

The latest in a string of cancer genome sequencing papers is now online at Nature. The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, a large consortuim of cancer researchers, has searched the genomes of 206 different brain cancer samples (all glioblastomas) for a variety of aberrations.