The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat
chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (http://bit.ly/uEC5) 'artificial cell' (http://bit.ly/c27AL5), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team really did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.)
It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)
The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat
This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research,
as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.
This is slightly off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.
The artificial-cell experiment was pretty interesting. It demonstrated that epigenetic information is not necessary for a viable cell.
More than that, though, it's a "hello, world" — although the cell itself didn't do anything useful, now we have the compiler working, albeit expensively. Now we can do experiments like the following:
- removing introns entirely to see if that damages viability;
- inserting the gene you want at a specific place in the bacterial genome instead of splicing it in at some random place.
Basically, it's a "control group" for a much more precise set of experiments than we've been able to do in the past. It's easy to take the ability to do "hello, world" for granted as a programmer.
It was definitely interesting, but it wasn't the breakthrough it was hyped-up to be. Seeing it as a 'hello world' is a cool idea, though. The hardware of the cell was ready and waiting. So Venter and his team rewrote an old program and gave it a spin. Nice.
This is more likely a lack of understanding on my part, but I'm not sure where epigenetics comes into it? The majority of the cell components - i.e. all the organelles, chemicals, etc - were already present and arranged in the 'surrogate' cell. So all the 'epigenetic' stuff was already in place. But please correct me if I'm wrong.
Not so sure about the random splicing part, either. Food manufacturers have been inserting genes into specific places on bacterial plasmids for a long a time, using directors like codon relationships and ionic interactions. Again - if I'm outta line... :)
Oh, I meant that DNA methylation (resp. phosphorylation, acetylation, etc.) wasn't preserved through the uploading / "DNA printing" process. (And I don't think the cells in question had histones.) You're right that there is potential epigenetic variation in other parts of the cell as well, but I was thinking specifically of DNA methylation.
I don't actually know much about how position-specific current transgenic techniques are, so I could be wrong about that.
The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat
chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (http://bit.ly/uEC5) 'artificial cell' (http://bit.ly/c27AL5), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team really did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.)
It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)