In a recent series of posts (Embryo screening should be mandatory, Allowing children to be born with severe disease is morally equivalent to child abuse, round 2, and Arguments against routine screening for severe disease genes; food for thought), Daniel MacArthur over at Genetic Future has discussed the issue of genetic screening of potential parents and embryos so that genetic diseases can be avoided in the population. Many of the arguments revolve around moral issues,... Full Post
Last week was the first Genome Informatics Alliance meeting. It was a meeting of second-generation sequence vendors, users, data repositories, and other high-throughput endeavors, e.g., high-energy physics and Google, to discuss the challenges that second-generation sequencing is creating for bioinformatics. I gave a talk at the meeting to help introduce the people not in genomics to the issues we currently face. Yesterday I recreated the talk, recording an audio track (while battling a bit of... Full Post
For you RSS readers that do not visit the site, I thought I would point out a few of the blogs I have recently added to the Blogroll list on the right-hand side of the page. First, there are the infamous AGBT genomics bloggers, Genetic Future's Daniel MacArthur (the most prolific of the bunch), Mass Genomics' Dan Koboldt, and Anthony Fejes. Others blogging in the genomics field are the imitable Sean Eddy and Steven Salzberg,... Full Post
There is an interesting article, Beyond the Data Deluge, on Science that discusses how various scientific disciplines are facing massive increases in data generation rates and how they are dealing with it. The article has several useful references for those interested in learning more. It seems the authors worked closely with Jim Gray, who went missing while sailing about two years ago. Full Post
It seems Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is up to his old tricks again, doing the bidding of the large publication houses and introducing H.R. 801, the misleadingly named Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. This bill would remove the requirement that publications from publicly funded research be made available freely to the public after a period of time. In effect allowing journal publishers to profit from tax payer funded research findings, but not tax payers.... Full Post