Tag: Science Communication

ScienceOnline: More than a conference

The Finch & Pea would not exist as you know it today if it were not for ScienceOnline. Mike and I liked the pub idea, but also realized that a pub with only two people in it – no matter how interesting. clever, and handsome, was a pretty lousy watering hole. The enthusiasm for our approach to science communication I experienced at ScienceOnline2012 led to the decision to bring on more “staff” at The Finch & Pea and 60% of those additions are folks we only met because of ScienceOnline.

Science Online has not only been a positive force for The Finch & Pea, but for the development of online science communication as a whole. At the Science Writers 2012 conference, the Science Online community clearly represented a cadre of youthful (not necessarily young) and dynamic future leaders for science communication.

Now, they are asking for help to expand that community (not to subsidize the conference): Continue reading “ScienceOnline: More than a conference”

Life versus the molecular storm

lifes-ratchetRichard Feynman put it best: “Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen… Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone.”

The same could be said about things on a very large scale, such as planets and galaxies. It could also be said about extremes of time and temperature – we have no direct experience with microseconds and millions of years, or with what happens at thousands of degrees or near absolute zero. Scientific concepts that deal with such extremes defy our meso-scale common sense.

We respond to these assaults on our intuition sometimes with gee-whiz fascination, and at other times, when cherished beliefs are on the line, with resistance. Can our mundane actions really change the climate of something so large as the earth? How could we possibly have descended from small, furry dinosaur prey? And if a tornado whipping through a junkyard can’t spontaneously create a Boeing 747, can it really be true that complex, living, self-directing beings are formed out of molecules that merely follow the laws of physics and chemistry, without the guiding influence of vital spirits? Continue reading “Life versus the molecular storm”

Genome PR is OK

There was some criticism of this video out there, but I liked it. Given how little attention the average news reader/online browser is going to devote to genomics, I think this kind of thing is just right (except for the misleading throwaway line about junk DNA).

Sure, the video hypes ENCODE as biology’s latest, greatest, development, but nobody outside the scientific community is going to know the difference between ENCODE and all of the rest of us genome biologists anyway. So basically, the video us hyping all of us.

ENCODE Decodes the genome… but how much is functional?

The latest round of ENCODE papers are out, accessible via a handy ENCODE explorer gateway at Nature. I know what I’ll be doing for the next week. Stay tuned for more Finch & Pea coverage of what all this means, but I can’t resist a few brief comments about function.

First, you can immediately dismiss the NY Times’s misleading headline that suggests much, much more of the genome is functional than we previously thought. Being an intron counts as ‘function’ here, which is a pretty low bar to meet. The ENCODE results indicate that much of the genome is represented within introns, which I find fascinating, but that’s not something that forces us to dramatically revise our ideas about function in the genome.

Second, I’m going to claim (without any proof whatsoever) the title of the world’s record holder for “the largest number of randomly generated DNA sequences tested for function in an enhancer assay.” Hopefully in the not too distant future you can read in print about the 1000+ random sequences (plus several thousand genomic sequences) we tested in our new, smokin’ hot, high-throughput enhancer assay, but here’s the punch line: it’s not that difficult to randomly generate a DNA sequence that will drive substantial tissue-specific transcription.

In other words, whether it’s been selected for function or not, DNA is generally not biochemically inert.

P.S. This seems to be consistent with Ewan Birney’s comment, “It’s clear that 80% of the genome has a specific biochemical activity – whatever that might be.”

P.P.S. Brief methods: We took sequences under ChIP-seq peaks, thoroughly scrambled them while preserving the original di-nucleotide frequencies, and dropped them upstream of a basal promoter to test for enhancer activity.

Pursue ignorance, learn science

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

Dr. Stewart Firestein, a Columbia University neurobiologist is a scientist after my own heart. A former actor and theater manager, he went to graduate school in his mid-thirties, and despite the late start, has pursued a successful career understanding olfaction. He teaches a class on ignorance in science, and he’s written a book based on the ideas in the class, Ignorance: How It drives Science.

The basic message of the book is that facts are boring, while ignorance is (or can be) interesting, and we need to teach and practice science with this in mind. In this brief, genial book, Firestein gives advice on how to have an interesting conversation with a scientist – ask any of the following questions:

Continue reading “Pursue ignorance, learn science”