Quote: Walter Gilbert predicting personal genomics

I'm catching up on my reading this weekend. Right now I'm getting through Misha Angrist's "Here Is A Human Being" and getting increasingly jealous for every page. Angrist had his genome sequenced as a part of the Personal Genome Project, something I wouldn't mind having done myself.

I found this lovely 1992 quote from Walter Gilbert in the book. The number of bases of the human genome was pretty accurate even back in the early nineties.

Three billion bases of DNA sequence can be put on a single compact disc and one will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, "Here is a human being; it's me!"

This year marks the first decade since the "full" (more or less) sequence of the human genome was announced. But the advancements (and nightmarish visions) many expected still form an alluring horizon. One day, I want to be able to get my genome sequence out and say "Here I am; it's me!" Some people see all kinds of problems with personal genomics, but I can hardly wait for the day.

Book Tip: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

During these holidays I've tried to catch up with a lot of reading, and one book that I literally could not put down is Mike Brown's "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming". It's a very personal re-count of the discoveries by Brown's research team that lead to the "demotion" of Pluto from a planet to a "dwarf planet", but most of all it's a great story of how scientific inquiry and scientific discovery happens.

Mike Brown's team found themselves scooped out of one of their main discoveries, under suspicious circumstances, which forced them to announce their discovery of the "tenth planet" Eris before their analysis was finished. This takes the book into a discussion of whether or not it's right for researchers to hold on to their discoveries until they have researched them thoroughly, a process that can take years, or if it's preferable to "release" them into the world as fast as possible. Brown's team was accused of "hiding" information from the astronomical community.

One of the things that is so strange about these allegations is that they should also be made of every single scientific result that is published in every single reputable scientific journal. In all such cases, scientists make discoveries, they verify their discoveries, they carefully document their discoveries, and they submit papers to scientific journals. What they don't do is make discoveries and immediately hold press conferences to announce them... Good science is a careful and deliberate process. The time from discovery to announcement in a scientific paper can be a couple of years.

<...>

The discovery itself contains very little of scientific interest. Almost all of the science that we are interested in doing comes from studying the object in detail after discovery.

Brown also captures the nervous anticipation of having made a discovery but not being able to talk about it for the longest time, and the sheer terror that someone else will have seen the same thing and get there before you. I can relate. To me this is one of the book's biggest merits, bringing this perspective of the scientific process out to the general audience. A discovery should remain "brewing" for whatever time it takes to analyze it, before it's announced. This is especially important in light of sensationalistic scientific announcements by press conference.

Book tip in Swedish: Om hjärnan

I'm back from my 5 week vacation, only to be thrown right back into work. What can I say? There are articles to be submitted for review and conferences to prepare for so there is no rest for the wicked. It's all good though. I just wanted to pop in to give you a quick book tip and let you know what I worked on a lot earlier this year.

The publisher Fri Tanke is publishing parts of Oxford University Press' "A Very Short Introduction" series in Swedish translations, starting out with "The Brain: A Very Short Introduction", "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction" and "Free Will: A Very Short Introduction". Find more info on Fri Tanke's website. I had the pleasure of assisting on the Swedish edition of "The Brain" by fact-checking the translation. See? That's my name on the copyright page below so you know I'm not lying. I even got a little biography blurb at the end of the book, and the opportunity to suggest some further reading.

I spent many an evening and sometimes many a sleepless night back in January and February working on this, and it's the first time I get to do something of this type, so I'm really pleased that the outcome turned out as good as it did. If you're looking for a comprehensive and easy to understand introduction to the brain in Swedish, I really can't recommend anything better. The book is called "Kort om Hjärnan" by Michael O'Shea and that's the very pink book cover at the top of the page. It came out while I was on vacation in June so I haven't had the time to really comment on it until now.



Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Boktips,
Technorati tags: Science, Neuroscience, Brain