On systems biology and bullshit

Clarity and lucidity are key strengths of scientists and writers. Jargon and cliches can make the best paper unreadable. This is why science writer Carl Zimmer keeps an index of banned words his students should avoid.

One of the words on the index is ‘breakthrough,’ which is overused, because the person reporting it doesn’t bother to think about how big the step forward really is. Using such cliches shows sloppy thinking and lack of scrutiny. This is why Zimmer bans ‘breakthrough‘ “unless you are covering Principia Mathematica”, in which case you are fine, regardless of whether you refer to Whitehead and Russell or Newton.

Not only science writers need to avoid cliches and enrich their texts for content – ‘real’ scientists also often use fancy buzz words with far too much levity. Just think of these three (in no particular order) that you can hear in almost every systems biology talk:

1. Integrated,
2. Network,
3. System.

In store now! A Duke Saga Starter Set!

You want to impress your friends with detailed knowledge of the Duke breast cancer disaster?

Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes have collected everything you need to get started here:
http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/Supplements/ReproRsch-All/Modified/StarterSet/index.html

It contains

1. a video of one of Keith Baggerly’s talks (given at my institute in Cambridge),
2. the 60 Minutes episode and clip,
3. slides from a recent presentation with some of the newer details,
4. the 2009 Annals of Applied Statistics paper,
5. an editorial they wrote for Clinical Chemistry about what information should be required to support clinical “omics” publications, and
6. links to the Institute of Medicine session recordings and slides.

Mix Tape #3: It’s the animal spirits!

Once I got started, I couldn’t stop: Collecting songs with a science theme is quite addictive. Maybe from now on I just hand them out in packages of five or so.

Thousand Days — Abscence (2008?)

Pardis Sabeti, working at Harvard and the Broad Institute and lead scientist on a recent, discussion-stirring paper on detecting interactions, is also the lead singer in the band Thousand Days. And the person who put together this video must be a huge fan of her and her music – or it’s just a Broad-thing to promote everything and everybody with a video:

Revitalizing labs with “artscience” — David Edwards: The Lab

In science, meticulousness and diligence trump creativity and imagination. At least that is how it’s often perceived: Scientific logic and order lead to Truth; imaginative creative chaos leads to something looking nice at best.

This dichomtomy is all wrong and obstructs innovation, argues The Lab by David Edwards, a Harvard professor with a vision of disciplinary cross-over:

Ignorance is my new comfort zone

I recently sat on a grant review panel for the first time. The diversity of topics and projects we had to rank was immense and I felt very ill-equipped to scientifically judge most of the grants, which were not related at all to my own research.

In particular, I was the lead discussant for an obstetrics project that was clearly outside my expertise. So I started my discussion by saying:

“I don’t have a problem being outside my comfort zone, but this one is so far out of it that I can’t even see my comfort zone anymore.”

What I got as an answer, surprised me.

Radiant with triumphant calamity — Feyerabend in Frankfurt?

Great minds think alike. Having recently read Feyerabend’s Tyranny of Science I was reminded of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung), a key text in Critical Theory and the Frankfurt school. I had never managed more than the first chapter of Dialectic, but that was already enough to find surprising parallels. Feyerabend doesn’t mention Adorno or Horkheimer in his autobiography, but he sure converged on some of the same ideas.