Sep 2010
The Hard Decisions
29/09/10 02:54 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Funding success rates are down, in part because of the economic downturn, and this has further increased competition for funding and placed more pressure on applicants and reviewers. S. Pelech comments that in his experience, while there has been a steady improvement in the quality of submitted grant applications over the last 25 years, there has also been a concurrent errosion in the quality of grant reviews. He also notes that the growing trend towards funding mega-projects has also resulted in less demonstrated productivity per research dollar invested. Read More...
Scooped
24/09/10 15:53
Pennsylvania State University's Stephan Schuster and his colleagues were scooped after their work on sequencing the cacao genome and the Tasmanian devil was upstaged by rivals' announcements in the press while they were waiting until after their work went through peer review to promote it. S. Pelech comments that most scientists have been "scooped" at some stage of their careers, and rather than celebrating individual scientists that are the first to report a big discovery, perhaps we should recognize more those who have a long track record of scientific contribution and achievement. Read More...
A Look at Chemical Biology
23/09/10 14:09 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Derek Lowe at Pipeline stated that the combination of organic chemistry and molecular biology with chemical biology is an interesting and productive research frontier, especially with the ability to modify existing enzymes for new purposes. S. Pelech further adds that nature could be significantly improved upon by intelligent design, and that new proteins could be designed that feature more than 20 amino acids with an expanded genetic code with less redundancy. Read More...
Evolution of a Fruit Fly, Evolution of a Human
22/09/10 18:19 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Researchers at UC Irvine have published research results with fruit flies that confirm the so-called "soft sweep" theory of evolutionary that the exploitation of small differences in many different genes were responsible for the emergence of new traits, rather that a large mutation in single genes. "If complex traits, including susceptibility to disease, are influenced by tens or hundreds of genes, then treatments targeted to single genes won't be very effective". S. Pelech questions the applicability of studies with flies that can bred after 8.5 days with humans that must be about 12 years old before they are capable of reproduction, but notes that it is already well appreciated that many genes influence complex traits, and susceptibility to diseases does not arise from just a few genes. Read More...
Early-Warning DNA Sequencing System
21/09/10 15:12 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Using DNA sequencing, researchers at Pacific Biosciences have started a project called the Disease Weather Map, which monitors viruses from locations like sewage stations, toilet handles, and people's mouths, in an effort to measure pathogen flux over time and track the emergence of new pathogen variants. S. Pelech comments that a cost-benefit analyses of doing this should quickly reveal its impracticality, and that it would be much cheaper to track where and when people are getting sick, and then rapidly identify the culprit. Read More...
George Williams Dies
16/09/10 18:30 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Evolutionary biologist George Williams, who died at 83 years of age in 2010, was widely regarded by peers in his field as one of the most influential and incisive evolutionary theorists of the 20th century and advanced the argument that natural selection works at the level of the gene and individual. S. Pelech argues it would be a mistake to believe that natural selection works simply at the level of the gene and individual, but that eusociality plays as much if not a greater role than the individual. The concept of the gene as being the basic unit of natural selection arises from the bigotry of those that hold a strong genopocentric perspective. Read More...
The Money of Sequencing
16/09/10 17:41 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Matthew Herper of Forbes noted that there has been an increasing number of cases in which people have been helped medically by knowing their genome and wonders how in the future how this will be monetized into a business. S. Pelech remarks that there have only been a few scattered reports where people have actually been helped medically by knowing their full genome, and points out that if genome sequencing is to become widely used for diagnostics, then it will have to be ultimately funded by government agencies that pay for health care or insurance companies. Read More...
Suggestions for Drug Approvals
14/09/10 14:41 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Derek Lowe in the Pipeline ackowledged that a regulatory system for approving new drugs is certainly necessary, but wondered whether instead of a system that makes binary decisions, an adaptive system would be better that makes faster decisions based on the data, that are then modified accordingly when additional findings come out. S. Pelech cautions that it is possible that drugs used for treatment of chronic conditions might have much wider dispersion before it is realized that they can have very serious longer-term side-effects in a significant portion of users. He also emphasizes the need for clinical testing of drug combinations, which may become more difficult as the number of possibilities escalates with the appearance of promising new drugs and the number of available patients for a specific trial declines with the identification of more biomarkers to stratify them. Read More...
The Misunderstood Gene
09/09/10 13:03 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
University of Oxford neuropsychology professor Dorothy Bishop wanted to know where people get the idea that traits like intelligent could be determined by individual genes. S. Pelech points that intelligence is not really a single trait but the manifestation of a series of complex behaviours that arise from both multi-gene influences and the environment, and cautions that genetic profiling companies that advertise that they can identify inborn talents & personality traits from genome sequencing or SNP analyses are plainly deceiving the public. Read More...
It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times...
08/09/10 19:49 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Physician James Le Fanu has suggested that research institutions have never been so impressive and well funded, but their recent output has been rather disappointing when compared to the beginning of the 20th century, and this has generated a lot of negative feedback from the biomedical research community. S. Pelech accepts some and challenges many of Dr. Le Fanu criticisms about biomedical research progress, but points out that the US citizen commitment to finance biomedical research has actually been very modest in real numbers when income, taxation and inflation are factored in. Read More...
Craig Venter, "Hopeless Businessman"
06/09/10 17:03 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
In a New York Times article, Craig Venter is quoted saying that he has been "successful in his finding alternate ways to fund research," although one of his venture capitalist friends, Alan Walton has commented that "Craig is just a hopeless businessman." S. Pelech points out that Dr. Venter is amongst those rare visionaries that are really driving scientific advancement forward, with or without the help of government agencies and charitable organizations, but also aided by other individuals of financial means or know how that share their visions. Read More...
Tips for Successful Grants
01/09/10 19:15 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Morgan at The Scientist's Naturally Selected blog offered some tips for writing successful grant applications. S. Pelech suggests that a strategy, that while humorous, seems to work quite well based on his experience in grant panels. Read More...