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.

Mega-projects

In Defense of Risk

Blogger Proflike Substance questioned the adversity of federal agencies to funding risky research, since this can offer the biggest rewards. S. Pelech figures that all experimental research should have risk if it is truly original and not merely confirmatory. The decision to carry out a specific experiment or line of enquiry is dictated by the rewards verses the costs, which include time, money, and lost opportunity to pursue more productive directions. Granting agencies generally support low risk, hypothesis-driven research, because this is often believed to lead to better designed experiments that produce clearer answers to the questions posed, but S. Pelech challenges this view. Read More...