William Deresiewicz at The Nation wrote that because there are too many PhDs for the number of academic jobs available, they are "cheaper to hire and easier to fire, and save institutions money. Dr. Deresiewicz suggests that tenured professors need to speak out and spear-head initiatives to create better opportunities for new faculty with longer term prospects. S. Pelech comments that it is untenable that university or government lab positions could or should be available for the vast majority, and that industry has to be able to employ these highly trained and skilled individuals. Academic institutes and government agencies should be facilitating the ability of entrepreneurial professors to create companies rather than erecting barriers that stifle such activities, for example, on the basis of conflict of interest. Read More...

Tags: Career, Jobs, Retirement

Blogger Razib Khan at the Gene Expression blog claimed that bias is "rife in any science which utilizes statistics." The GiveWell blog has suggested researchers publish their questions, theories, and planned methods of data collection before their begin their work, so that if the results come out differently from what the researchers expected, then this cannot be hidden. S. Pelech argues that one of the major reasons why bias can have such a profound impact on the outcome of a scientific study is that there is so much emphasis on conducting hypothesis-driven research. In conducting system-wide, unbaised research to seek what is really going on inside of organisms and their cells, half the battle is to collect sufficient data and the other half is to look at the results with fresh eyes and let the data reveal to the observer what is happening. Read More...

Tags: Research Bias

A new report from the advocacy group United for Medical Research, and authored by economist Everett Ehrilich predicts that "the gene sequencing business will grow by 20 percent a year and become a $1.7 billion industry by 2015. According to a separate report authored by the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute, the National Institutes of Health's $3.8 billion investment in the Human Genome Project, along with subsequent capital provided by the government and the private sector, generated a total return of roughly $49 billion in direct and indirect federal tax revenues over the last two decades or so. S. Pelech questions the validity of estimates of the economic benefits from the direct investment of the NIH in the Human Genome Project (HGP), especially since private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects made major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have actually been targeted by the industry to date. Read More...

Tags: Grant funding, Genomics, Human Genome Project

Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn has launched a company called Telome Health to provide a commercial genetic test for less than $200 to measure telomere shortening, to give people insight on their aging process. It would entail taking a blood or saliva sample, and measuring the telomere length in white blood cells, to determine if people need to change their lifestyles, such as reducing stress and cessation of smoking. S. Pelech is dubious about using telomere length to assess one's current health status considering all of the variables including one's age, and suggests focusing on more accute and dynamic biomarkers such as stress protein levels and protein phosphorylation. Read More...

Tags: Teleomeres, Elizabeth Blackburn

Karen Birchard at The Chronicle of Higher Education speculates that the victory for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party in the recent election might lead to increased investment in research, but Blogger David Ng at The Intersection, suggests the opposite — that a Conservative majority "is a step back for science" in Canada. He argues that "the Harper government has consistently ignored whatever sound utility the scientific endeavor can provide, and by doing so, has put the future of Canadian science at risk." S. Pelech comments that overall government investment in science in Canada has not really differed that much between the Liberal and Conservative Parties when they have been in power in the past few decades. However, he argues that the diversion of precious research dollars to initiatives such as GenomeCanada has most likely contributed to the decline of the biotechnology industry in Canada and the plight that most Canadian biomedical scientists face today in getting support for their research. Read More...

Tags: Grant funding, Politics