Jun 2010
The Benefit of a Grant
21/06/10 15:12 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The US NIH spends more than $21 billion a year on research grants, and the STAR METRICS program aims to determine the economic impact of this investment, although other studies indicate that it may take about 17 years for an investment in research to visibly pay off in some way. S. Pelech wonders why such an accountability has not been mandated sooner, and notes that in Canada, it seems that the economic returns for the funding of genomics mega projects has been extremely poor. Read More...
The Genome and the Economy
18/06/10 13:34 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Mike Mandel at Mandel on Innovation and Growth has blogged that after a decade, the Human Genome Project has failed to deliver medically significant results, but he is optimistic that a significant economic impact will emerge over the next 5 to 10 years. S. Pelech argues that the true dividend from the sequencing of the human genome will not materialize until we can make sense of what all of the expressed proteins and functional RNA oligonucleotides are actually doing, but instead current efforts remain fixated on continuing to sequence the genomes of hundreds of different species and thousands of different people. Read More...
Small Prize, Big Question
18/06/10 13:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Anthony Goldbloom at Kaggie has offered a modest $100 award to the person who gives the best short answer to the question: "What has bioinformatics ever done for us?" S. Pelech, who did not win the prize, responds: "No Bioinformatics = No gene sequencing analysis = No genetic engineering = No biotechnology industry = No commercial recombinant protein, peptide or oligonucleotide production = No molecular diagnostics + therapeutics = No personalized medicine. Read More...
GSA: 'Cardinal' Organisms to Human Biology
15/06/10 00:47 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Gary Ruvkun at Harvard Medical School suggested renaming "model organisms" as "cardinal organisms" in view of their importance in basic research and in the clinic. S. Pelech argues that this suggestion is rather self-serving and markedly overstates the real value of the study of invertebrates for understanding human pathology and further perpetuates the mythology that genomics analyses of organisms such as yeast, flies and worms are providing continuing breakthroughs in clinical research. Read More...
Quality vs. Quantity
03/06/10 14:46 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Bloggers Massimo and DrugMonkey have questioned whether it is reasonable to expect graduate student trainees to have multiple publications result from their thesis research. S. Pelech maintains that every effort should be expended for graduate students to publish original research in scientific journals, but they should still be able to receive a graduate degree if their thesis research in a competitive area has been scooped and no longer has sufficient novelty upon its completion to be published. Read More...