The German magazine Spiegel has a nice paper about the false memory debate and the “implanted” memory of events that never happened. They cite Hans Markowitsch from Bielefeld that the autobiographical memory is not very good in recalling past events, being much much more adapted to orientation of current and future events. Has anyone examined blogs and if their content can be recalled by the author? Nai, nai.
I have argued earlier that the free decision of an individual to allow genetic testing, will also reveal data on genetic relatives that have never consented to that procedure.
A new review by Bruce Weir now confirms that “it is reasonably straightforward to find the probability of the genotypes of individuals when their relationship is known…” My current work lets me also assume that with 500,000 SNP data at hand, much individual characteristics of the donor can be reconstructed – there are no anonymous DNAs datasets as some people still believe.
I even fear that genetic testing will increase for example in “homeless” (in vitro fertilized) individuals as these people will want to prevent sibling marriage – see for example the a-China DNA project. Other people may be curious about their genealogy, others about drug side effect prediction, lifestyle, assurance questions…
With every new dataset, available datasets will gradually decrease their anonymity level. I fear that anonymity is not so much a dichotomous property, it is much more a likelihood ratio to stay unknown under the probability to be known. Yea, yea.
Time online of Dec 17, 2006 reports that the British police is holding the DNA records of more than 1m innocent people — eight times more than ministers have previously admitted. I wonder if this will affect participation rate of the UK Biobank that targets health of lifestyle, environment and genes in 500,000 people.
Just came to my attention that there is research of sleep related genes, the usual stuff of protein kinases, dopaminergic receptor, and serotonine transporter. Also this research community seem to have the common difficulty of the complex disease gene mappers – to understand a phenomenon (not a trait) as systemic function, an intrinsic property of a multicellular and multiwired brain, yea, yea.
More strange phenotypes orgasm frequency, pain, human memory performance.
Read also the what-we-could-have-learned-from-linkage-studies.
Reading about science projects, glue projects and platform projects, all with minority, gender, public communication and ethics modules while including large administrative overheads, travel and meeting costs, I even wonder how much money is finally going to real research – careful experimentation and thoughtful interpretation. Some people seem to spend more time on creating logos than in study design, yea, yea.
Starting with another African proverb, here are some thoughts about evolution, design and the difference of chimps and humans. Yes, I am biased, I know.
I have learned that there are mainly three differences between chimps and human – the ability to run, a larger brain size and the language/speech capability. The only trait that can directly observed is the ability to run (check Munich marathon: Neither brain size and language can be directly observed :-) BTW, I renember having seen a family that walk on feet and hands – quadrupedal locomotion is a recessive trait linked to chromosome 17p, the way we all start our lifes).
So genetics is playing a big role in the human < -> ape differentiation. Or did the differentation select the genes?
You will understand my great expectations when now reading one of the first serious papers about the chimp and the human lineage. It is about pseudogenization, the gene loss during separation of species. The authors show 80 non-processed pseudogenes inactivated in the human lineage – while gently negelecting the fact of another 7868 or so pseudogenes in the human pseudogene database.
There is also nothing about my favorite trait bipedalism (only a ridiculous quote of pseudogenization of the sarcomeric myosin gene MYH16 that should relate to hominin masticatory muscles that “may have allowed the brain size expansion”, uhhh. It is also hard to understand how gain of ability should be caused by loss of gene function, yea, yea.
A new paper in the Deutsche Ärzteblatt argues that there should be alternatives to RCTs. The reasons are manifold
Community-based studies may therefore not be as bad, yea, yea.
An extended and reworked version of this blog can be found in issue 45 of the “Deutsche Ärzteblatt“, page A3019, 10th November 2006.
It is has been assumed very often, however, there is not so much empirical research that studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies are less likely to be published only if not showing a favorable outcome. Here is a study of 100 articles of the pulmonary/allergy literature that supports this view. Yea, yea.
There is no need to say that impact factors have largely failed to measure scientific value – even within selected groups (look for the Wikipedia article).
But are there any alternatives to ISI-Thompson? I haven’t found so many, the Hirsch factor, Google Scholar page rank, or Elseviers Scopus. Of course download figures of open access journals help to define popularity. But is this impact?
The latest development are citation management systems like CiteULike or Connotea that require to make all your readings public. Maybe its true what 80-year-old Garfield wrote in the BMJ: “there is no substitute for judgement, quality, and relevance. Impact and other citation measures merely report facts.” So blogs are even more important, yea, yea.
The genesis – the common book of Jewish and Christian faith – reports the begining of the world. Interestingly , the creation of living things include also genes in the same instance: “1.11 let the earth spawn grass and leaves that make seeds…” We have been told that reverse genetics may not be used any more. Whats about forward genetics? Yea, yea.
-moblog- The next Lancet will publish my editorial on the b2AR and asthma association – “Has all been said?” This is to honour my favorite comedian Karl Valentin “It has all been said – but not by everybody”.
I have to confess that I wanted a completely different title “Search and rescue after the avalanche” where I described the tedious work to find all buried corpses under tons of snow – in analogy for the many genetic association studies – fearing already the next avalanche of genomewide SNP scans. Renember – very dangerous – steep 45o slopes, North West and new snow. Yea, yea.
“See no evil, hear no evil, do not evil: The lessons of immune privilege” is the title of an excellent paper by Jerry Niederkorn in nature immunology. He basically says that there are only 3 human organs that allow foreign tissue grafts: eye, brain and pregnant uterus. If we leave the special situation of the uterus aside, and see the yes as an extension of the brain – there is only the brain that is no attcked by the immune self. Being still under influence of the Popper/Eccles discussion of the brain and its self , here is my back on the envelope picture of social self < -> immune self < -> conscious mind. Yea, yea.
 
-moblog- A new nature medicine paper describes a deficient induction of interferon beta (gene is on chr 9) and interferon lambda (gene is on chr 19). The author concludes that genetic polymorphisms are an unlikely cause as genes are on different chromosomes. What a misunderstanding – does the author really believe in a single asthma gene? Yea, yea.
-moblog- Probably inspired by reading Carlos Ruiz Zafon “La Sombra del Viento – Shadow of the Wind – Schatten des Windes” telling about a cemetry of books I wonder whether it would make sense to
have also a cemetry of rejected papers. Would that be useful to have an arXiv.org-like access to papers that will otherwise be forgotten? Yea, yea.
Don´t read this if you haven´t finished your thesis.
Tadataka Yamada -former chairman of research and development for SmithKline Beecham Pharamaceuticals- is quoted in The Lancet of August 12, 2006, that “99% of what we do in industry fails”.
John Ioannides revises his PLOS statement from “most” research finding is false to “up to 90%” for a moderate risk factors with limited replication. Given the fact that many negative studies are never published, also academia would be in the Yamada range.
I should have been taught that earlier. Yea, yea.
The Lord’s prayer has been translated into nearly all languages (where 1,377 languages are online). Having a father in heaven is comforting but from a genetic standpoint we don´t take it literally (in contrast to some other family relationships in the Lutheran tradition).
Although pedigrees usually list only father names, the absolute amount of DNA transmitted from father to children is less than for women, who always transmit a long X as well as mitochondrial DNA. When testing for paternity in family studies, my experience is that about 3% of the children do not match with their fathers (while I have never found a mother that did not match). This fact does not seem to be new: Already the Romans knew that “Mater certa, pater semper incertus“.
Is DNA testing for paternity really so important as many commercial websites make you to believe? Genes are part of our existence, environment is another as well as what WE want to achieve in life. Nay, nay, genes are not so important knowing so many wonderful non-genetic fathers.