I recently did a text mining of all the article titles for Cell Stem Cell for 2012. The results were very insightful (expressed in a beautiful word cloud) for the journal and what are the top areas of focus of authors publishing there. I just did the same analysis for the journal Stem Cells and …
Text mining journal Stem Cells: intriguing comparison to Cell Stem Cell Read More »
I predict by 2015 most major journals will have ended their hardcopy print versions and will be entirely digital. It just makes good sense from so many perspectives including financially and from an environmental view. This is a radical change from just a few decades ago. During my youngest childhood years, there were no personal …
Digital prediction: the end of print science journals Read More »
Why are most brain cancers so difficult to treat leaving the unfortunate patients who suffer from them in dire circumstances so often? The short answer is that we don’t know why. This lack of understanding is like a wall standing between the cures and us for these patients. We have to climb or knockdown this …
Brain cancer: why histones including H3.3 are so important Read More »
I love collaborative science. I believe it advances science faster. An example? My lab recently collaborated with another lab here at UC Davis of Dr. Oliver Fiehn, a metabolomics guru. Our paper on this just came out in PLOS ONE here. Admittedly, we got scooped by another lab that published the first ever metabolomics paper …
New paper on iPS cell metabolomics: striking, yet incomplete metabolic reprogramming Read More »
I’m getting some heat from some stem cell folks who think I should not have blogged about the Moriguchi iPS cell transplant case. Their argument seems to be it would have been preferable to either (A) not blog about the story at all or only minimally so fewer people would know about it or (B) …
Responding to critics of blogging the Moriguchi iPS cell story Read More »
Hisashi Moriguchi, who claimed to have transplanted iPS cells into six human patients has now admitted that he lied about five of them according to a new Nature piece by excellent science writer David Cyranoski, on the strange case citing several Japanese newspaper articles as sources. Quoted from a press conference yesterday in the Nature …
iPS cell fraud Moriguchi confesses to lying about almost, but not quite everything Read More »
More and more evidence is accumulating that the alleged iPS cell transplantation in human patients by Dr. Hisashi Moriguchi was bunk. Nature today has a piece out today on the story providing more quotes about the case that suggest the whole thing was made up. Rather than re-hash all the details, in this post I’m going …
The Moriguchi iPS transplant fable: key lessons & where do we go from here Read More »
The iPS cell field has had a relatively quiet 2012 so far, but one recent paper has drawn particular attention in the last 10 days. I’m talking about the paper from Jaenisch’s lab on iPS cells in Cell. Quite a few people are excited, but also scratching their heads a bit as to what this …
Jaenisch’s new, complicated iPS paper in Cell: what the heck does it all mean? Read More »
Obtaining research grant funding is a critical part of science, but the process seems to be getting more challenging each year. Funding rates are decreasing. Applicant frustration is increasing and many grant applicants tell me they feel confused about the differences between funded and unfunded proposals. The largest funder of biomedical research in the U.S. …
Interview with NIGMS Director, Jeremy Berg, part 1: grant advice, meritocracy Read More »
The fields of science related to DNA have for a long time been gene-centric. By this I mean that most scientists working in these areas have focused their attention and their efforts on the genes that make the proteins and RNAs that are the workers of the cell. What’s left over that wasn’t genes mainly …