A Few Useful Terms

Publishing

Getting your research report locked up so that the public cannot see.

Publishing in high visibility journal

Getting your research report removed from public view for ever.

Recently we tried to access a 1951 paper at Nature and, to our utter surprise, found the journal keeping it locked up 62 years after ‘publication’ !!! Copyright laws, initially created to protect individual authors, now allow these publishing houses to do whatever they want.

Science Paper

Fictional text, which the authors pay to get published (‘publish’ defined as above).

Scientist

A derogatory term for PI (principal investigator). For example, you can insult someone by saying “he is only a scientist, not a PI”. Fifteen years ago, the opposite statement could have been an insult.

Higher Organism

An organism with higher level of government funding.

Lower Vertebrate

A vertebrate NIH and other funding agencies does not care about.

Bioinformatician

A technician or scientist (used in derogatory way), who can run computer programs to analyze ‘big science’ data.

Bioinformatics Guru

A technician or scientist (used in derogatory way), who can run the above programs from command line.

Bioinformatics PI

So rare that he is given a unique name - Titus Brown. Only person with more extraordinary abilities than him is Kanye West.

Personal Genomics

Eugenics for the ipad generation.

New Study Reveals

New study failed utterly except in its ability to fool a journalist. For a detailed list of revealing studies, check

“Shocking Finding that a Genome by Itself Provides Little Insight”

College Student

A kid so weak in math that he cannot comprehend the compounding formula in his student loan contract.

Graduate Student

When the above kid finally reads his student loan contract.

Did we miss something?