Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Study: Discoveries in Non-Human Species Could Directly Benefit Man

The uncovering by deep homology of human genes in diverse model organisms such as yeast, worms and plants has prompted some scientists to propose that useful insights into the aetiology of human diseases such as cancer could be learned from these species. S. Pelech challenges this notion and argues that outside of insights into the most basic mechanisms of cell division and death, regulatory pathways with these highly conserved genes in these model organisms actually control very different processes and extrapolations from research findings with them can be very misleading. Read More...

Free Personal Genome, with a Catch

Blogger Iddo Friedberg at Byte Size Biology asked if people are willing to have their genomes sequenced for free if it was also made available for public research use along with some personal information, such as age, height, sex and disese history? However, wiith so many SNPs in the human genome, and over-riding factors such as epigenomic, transcriptional, translational and post-translational regulation affected by external factors, S. Pelech wonders just how useful knowledge of the sequence of one's genome will actually be in the near future. Read More...

Paul Nurse on Funding

Paul Nurse proposed that the most elite scientists should receive more funding, because it is these individuals that are the most likely to make the big breakthroughs that will drive science forward. S. Pelech disagrees and argues that even with more limited funding, the greater the number of different scientists involved in the discovery process, especially with cross-disciplinary expertise, the better the prospects for scientific advancement. Read More...

Rocket Scientists, Brain Surgeons, and All That

Success in science is proposed by blogger Zen Faulkes at NeuroDojo to depend more on perseverence than genius. S. Pelech agrees and notes that high curiosity and a real passion for their work gives leading scientists an edge. Read More...