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GenomeWeb Daily News is reporting that a dozen Congressional leaders tasked with striking a bipartisan agreement to cut the federal deficit said yesterday that they have failed to reach a deal, and that failure would now trigger a plan that would, if enacted, cut research funding across the government by nearly 8 percent.
What impact do you believe this might have on your research activities?
Click here to read more.
In the video below, Mendelspod interviews Jonathan Eisen, winner of the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Award and Academic editor in chief of PLOS biology. Dr. Eisen talks about the open science movement which is all about sharing and spreading knowledge. (It’s a long interview, but if you stick around to the end you’ll get a nice treat on the “brain doping” april fool’s gag.)
Stalking the Fourth Domain with Jonathan Eisen, Ph D from mendelspod on Vimeo.
Nature is perhaps the most prestigious journal around and it is the ultimate goal of every scientist to publish in Nature. Unfortunately, not all of us are lucky enough to produce results that merit a Nature quality publication. But do not despair! Alas, there is hope.
Yesterday, on the Nature website , I found one of the most amusing articles that I’ve ever read in Nature. The article quips that Nature has changed their publication policy and will no longer be accepting manuscripts from Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the article goes on to define grad students as bionic non humans since they spend most of their time interacting with “a sentient non-carbon-based machine.”
This is a fun read and a nice change in pace from otherwise intense scientific articles.
Click here to read the article.
Citation (lest you think I’m not serious): Jordan Suchow (2011). NPG’s policy on authorship Nature, 477 (244) : doi:10.1038/477244a
This past week the NIH announced that it was tightening its rules on financial conflict of interest for researchers receiving funding from drug and medical device companies. The new rules include the following revised regulations:
According to the Washington Post, there are over 40,000 scientists who currently receive more than $5,000 in annual funding from the drug and medical device industries.
Despite the NIH’s move towards increasing financial transparency, not all watchdog groups are happy with the measure.
To read more on this story see the Washington Post article and the associated press release from the NIH.
Yesterday, we told you about a study that found that family physicians are ill-prepared when it comes to diagnosing and treating patients based on their genomic data. As a follow up to that story, I’d like to bring your attention to a recent post by W. Gregory Feero, MD, PhD on KevinMD which talks about the overwhelming growth of genomic data and how the pace of discovery is far exceeding the capacity of the health care system’s IT infrastructure.
According to Dr. Feero, medical record keeping in the United States is a far cry away from being able to house the hundreds of petabytes of genomic data that will eventually need to be stored in their systems. Furthermore, upgrading to compatible systems are bound to be prohibitively expensive. He also postulates that the falling cost of genome sequencing might make it cheaper to sequence individual data on an as-needed basis as opposed to storing the data en-masse.
For further reading visit Data overload and the pace of genomic science
