After reading a string of disheartening reviews on the supposedly important future directions of biological research, I’m convinced that the older generation of biologists, those who made their careers in heyday of molecular biology during the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, have turned biology into an innumerate outlier among the natural sciences. Continue reading “Don’t ask a biologist to explain the behavior of the solar system”
Author: Mike White
Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction
Italo Calvino on how to build models of the world
Brilliant and hilarious, from Mr. Palomar, over at Gene Logic.
Theory, data, it’s all good
So says Sydney Brenner:
We now have unprecedented means of collecting data at the deepest molecular level of living systems and we have relatively cheap and accessible computer power to store and analyse this information. There is, however, a general sense that understanding all this information has lagged far behind its accumulation, and that the sheer quantity of new published material that can be accessed only by specialists in each field has produced a complete fragmentation of the science. No use will be served by regretting the passing of the golden years of molecular genetics when much was accomplished by combining thought with a few well-chosen experiments in simple virus and bacterial systems; nor is it useful to decry the present approach of ‘low input, high throughput, no output’ biology which dominates the pages of our relentlessly competing scientific journals. We should welcome with open arms everything that modern technology has to offer us but we must learn to use it in new ways. Biology urgently needs a theoretical basis to unify it and it is only theory that will allow us to convert data to knowledge.
“Sequences and consequences”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 12 January 2010 vol. 365 no. 1537 207-212
ESP and genetics
…not what you think. Electronic Scholarly Publishing: esp.org. (How nice to see that domain name devoted to real science.)
The ESP site is dedicated to the electronic publishing of scientific and other scholarly materials. Of particular interest are the history of science, genetics, computational biology, and genome research.
Check out their papers on the foundations of classical genetics, from Aristotle to Malthus, Morgan, and Muller.
(Hat tip to UC Berkeley’s Brad DeLong and his history of econ course.)
Oldie but goodie on junk DNA
Posted last October, Larry Moran on Junk DNA, creationism, and Ryan Gregory’s Onion test is worth a read.
A teaser:
Note that the Onion Test is for people who think they have a functional explanation for the vast amount of putative junk in our genome. What Ryan is suggesting is that such proposals should be able to account for the huge genome of onions as well as the huge genome of humans.
Let me give you some examples. Some people suggest that we need a big genome in order to protect our genes from mutation. If that’s true then why do onions need five times more DNA? Some people suggest that we have big genomes because we’re so complex and we need huge amounts of regulatory sequence. If so, why do onions need more?
The Finch and Pea 