Following the protestantic view of science here are some thoughts that I found in the new book by Benedetto XVI “Gesù di Nazaret” aka Joseph Ratzinger “Jesus von Nazareth”. Rationality as divine gift? Yes, Benedict follows the Historical Critical Method but wants to reconcile it with revelation that may not be accessible to logical arguments. This is certainly not a book on science (Show me more…)

Here is the announcement of an allergy meeting in London (where I will be too :-). (Show me more…)

I am not sure if my count of sequenced individuals is correct. While the Human Genome Project and Celera used a DNA mix for their draft version of the human genome, the next genomes were provided by Watson and Venter. Numer 4 to 12 were (Show me more…)

c’t 10.2008:82-89 has a nice article about open peer review “Die Weisheit der Massen” summarizing the current peer review process – the top line of the cartoon below. Following submission of a paper, it is initially screened for some formal requirements before being submitted to anonymous peer review and finally being published. Anonymous peer review lasts between 2 months and 2 years (!) and is abbreviated so far only by one biomedical journal (Show me more…)

Over the years I have collected a lot of curious hypotheses how allergy develops. Only recently I ended this list as it became rather long – and to be polite – rather useless. Sorry, less polite – but nonsense at its best (Show me more…)

Looking at the log file I found that an anonymous visitor was looking for “Jim’s DNA data” here. I thought of James Watson first. Obviously, however, the anonymous visitor was looking for something different: (Show me more…)