Here's a very good 3-page essay on how modern scientific policy and culture (e.g. short-term funding, unstable job security, publish-or-perish mindset) is adversely affecting young scientists, causing lots of bright minds to abandon academia in search of other careers (via @WileyScience). BioEssays: How today's scientific culture affects young scientists Anyone care to comment?
Update Thursday, April 29, 2010: See further commentary at a newer post here. Just finished reading Jon McClellan and Mary-Claire King's Genetic Heterogeneity in Human Disease essay in Cell. It's definitely one of the most forthright and compelling essays I've read on the subject of the inadequacy of GWAS for identifying genes that cause complex human disease. The essay starts with an evolutionary perspective.
Check out this review essay in Cell: Genetic Heterogeneity in Human Disease, by Jon McClellan and Mary-Claire King. (King's lab, incidentally, was the group who discovered via linkage analysis that the gene for early-onset breast and ovarian cancer on chromosome 17q21, nearly 5 years before Myriad Genetics filed for patent protection on the BRCA1/2 genes). Anyhow, looks like a great review on genetic heterogeneity and GWAS. Thanks @JVJAI.
Our Program in Computation Genomics Journal Club is starting again, now the 3rd Friday of each month. The next meeting is this Friday, April 16, at 3pm in the CHGR conference room. As usual, please bring in any articles you've found recently and give a brief overview of why you thought it was interesting.
A new paper in Nature by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium examining 16,000 cases of 8 common diseases and 3000 shared controls finds that common CNVs probed on existing arrays are well tagged by SNPs and are unlikely to contribute much to common human disease.
Check out this month's table of contents in Nature Methods. It contains a series of five commissioned Reviews discuss the challenges of visualizing biological data and the visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data.
If you read the previously mentioned "synthetic associations" paper in PLoS Bio by Dickson et al. in David Goldstein's group, be sure to read this brief commentary written by Pat Sullivan at UNC offering a different point of view.
A tip of the hat to @JVJAI for pointing out this interesting looking paper in AJHG. ROADTRIPS: Case-Control Association Testing with Partially or Completely Unknown Population and Pedigree Structure Timothy Thornton and Mary Sara McPeek Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington. Abstract: Genome-wide association studies are routinely conducted to identify genetic variants that influence complex disorders.
Here are the papers we talked about in yesterday's Journal Club: PLoS Biol. 2010 Jan 26;8(1):e1000294. Rare variants create synthetic genome-wide associations. See my previous coverage of this paper and the comments. Dickson SP, Wang K, Krantz I, Hakonarson H, Goldstein DB. PLoS Genet. 2010 Jan;6(1):e1000798.
"The hunt for the genetic roots of common diseases has hit a blank wall." ...quoting the first sentence in Nicholas Wade's New York Times article reviewing this PLoS Biology research paper by David Goldstein and his colleagues at Duke University. Also be sure to see Richard Robinson's synopsis of this paper, both published this week in PLoS Bio.