GM Crops & The Public Perception of Science

$1 million challenge for homeopathy

American magician and sceptic James Randi has challenged homeopathic practitioners to prove, under controlled, scientific conditions that homeopathy works. If they do, he'll give them $1 million.

See his video statement here:

Growing Google

A fun video on how the Google logo can be created in the microbiology lab.

My Secret Life - Friendly Numbers

My latest guest post for PBS NOVA's Secret Life of Scientists blog is now online. This week's episode features Synesthesia Researcher Steffie Tomson talking about her research and and her own experience of the condition.


You can read the post and watch the episode here.

In this month's post, I ponder the friendliness of numbers!

Little water flea has big genome

Credit: Paul Hebert, University of Guelph

The little water flea used to have pride of place on the front cover of the Leaving Certificate Biology textbook when I was going to school. Little did we realise then that Daphnia would turn out to be so impressive!

Research just published in Science shows that the near-microscopic freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex (the water flea) is the animal with most genes (about 31,000 in total).

"Daphnia's high gene number is largely because its genes are multiplying, creating copies at a higher rate than other species," said project leader and CGB (Centre for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Indiana University) genomics director John Colbourne.

"We estimate a rate that is three times greater than those of other invertebrates and 30 percent greater than that of humans."

Colbourne postulates that "since the majority of duplicated and unknown genes are sensitive to environmental conditions, their accumulation in the genome could account for Daphnia's flexible responses to environmental change."

Much of the media coverage has centred around the fact that the water flea outstrips humans in terms of gene number (humans have around 23,000 genes). This "paradox" known as the C-value enigma or C-value paradox is based on the fact that the genome size of an organism does not correlate with the complexity of the organism.

'Daphnia is an exquisite aquatic sensor, a modern version of the mineshaft canary' - James KlaunigIt's not a new idea - the term was first used in 1971 and the solution lies in the fact that lots of DNA in eukaryotes (i.e. non-bacteria) does not code for genes. For example, only about 1.5% of the human genome codes for genes. The wheat genome, for example, is five times larger than the human genome.

Daphnia have long been studied because they can be an indicator of environmental health in freshwater bodies. "Daphnia is an exquisite aquatic sensor, a potential high-tech and modern version of the mineshaft canary", says James Klaunig of Indiana University.

"With knowledge of its genome, and using both field sampling and laboratory studies, the possible effects of environmental agents on cellular and molecular processes can be resolved and linked to similar processes in humans."

[For our Irish Readers: Does anyone have an image of the front cover of the Leaving Certificate Biology Textbook with Daphnia ? If so, let me know and I'll add it to the post]

Reference
Colbourne, J., Pfrender, M., Gilbert, D., Thomas, W., Tucker, A., Oakley, T., Tokishita, S., Aerts, A., Arnold, G., Basu, M., Bauer, D., Caceres, C., Carmel, L., Casola, C., Choi, J., Detter, J., Dong, Q., Dusheyko, S., Eads, B., Frohlich, T., Geiler-Samerotte, K., Gerlach, D., Hatcher, P., Jogdeo, S., Krijgsveld, J., Kriventseva, E., Kultz, D., Laforsch, C., Lindquist, E., Lopez, J., Manak, J., Muller, J., Pangilinan, J., Patwardhan, R., Pitluck, S., Pritham, E., Rechtsteiner, A., Rho, M., Rogozin, I., Sakarya, O., Salamov, A., Schaack, S., Shapiro, H., Shiga, Y., Skalitzky, C., Smith, Z., Souvorov, A., Sung, W., Tang, Z., Tsuchiya, D., Tu, H., Vos, H., Wang, M., Wolf, Y., Yamagata, H., Yamada, T., Ye, Y., Shaw, J., Andrews, J., Crease, T., Tang, H., Lucas, S., Robertson, H., Bork, P., Koonin, E., Zdobnov, E., Grigoriev, I., Lynch, M., & Boore, J. (2011). The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex Science, 331 (6017), 555-561 DOI: 10.1126/science.1197761

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Don't trust this blog

This blog, I think, is well written and edited. I think that each post I produce is based on solid evidence and often, it is based on one or more peer-reviewed papers which are particularly newsworthy. Nevertheless, you can't trust it.

Try as I might to be totally balanced, this is just my representation of scientific news stories and peer-reviewed work.

I suppose what I'm saying is that my blog, like all other blogs, is not a replacement for peer-reviewed literature and the blogosphere is not an alternative to peer-reviewed scientific journals.

As a scientist, I recognise that the peer-review system works. Of course, there are problems with it and a few high-profile cases where it seems to have failed us, but overall it has stood the test of time. The British Government has recently announced a review of peer-review, but I would be confident that it will be shown to be the best method at our disposal to verify scientific findings.

Unfortunately, it would seem that some commentators feel that peer-review is definitely old hat and that a new system is needed. Of course, I'm talking about James Delingpole.

In a recent interview with Paul Nurse, for the BBC programme Horizon, Delingpole argued for the use of what he called 'peer-to-peer' review.

As you'll see from the video clip of the interview below, Nurse first made an analogy between accepting the consensus scientific viewpoint on the treatment of cancer and accepting the consensus scientific view of climate change. Writing in The Telegraph, Delingpole, a well known climate change sceptic, subsequently described this analogy as "shabby, dishonest and patently false".

"The consensus on climate change; and the consensus on medical care", says Delingpole, "bear no similarity whatsoever". You can judge for yourself whether the analogy  makes sense or not.

Having been flummoxed by Nurse's astute line of reasoning, he was subsequently asked about his use (or not) of peer-reviewed climate change literature.

"One of the main things to have emerged from the climategate emails was that the peer-review process has been, perhaps irredeemably corrupted" replied Delingpole.

"What I believe in now...is a process called peer-to-peer review. The internet is changing everything. What it means is that ideas which were previously only able to be circultated in the seats of academe, in papers read by a few people can now be instantly read on the internet and assessed by thousands and thousands of other scientists; people of scientific backgrounds and people like me who haven't got scientific backgrounds but are interested."

What he's talking about of course is the blogosphere. Now, as keen as I am on this whole blogging lark, I do not believe that the ability to switch on a computer and type entitles anyone (including myself) to begin to interpret scientific data for which we are wholly unqualified. Sure, we can have opinions and ideas about the findings but, as the old adage goes,"we are not entitled to our own facts".

Delingpole however seems to have no time to even begin to interpret the data correctly:

"It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed papers because  I simply haven't got the time, I haven't  the scientific expertise. What I rely on is people who have got the time and the expertise to do it and write about it  and interpret it. I am an interpreter of interpretations."

All well and good, and it's to his credit I suppose, that he admits that his opinions are not based on the real, original data. However, if he is to interpret the data (or the interpretations of the data... you know what I mean) then he must interpret all of the data and that means the overwhelming volume of research that points  to a global warming phenomenon caused by human interventions.

I may blog, but blogs are not real science. You can trust me on that!