First Human Bioinformatician Criticizes Bad Science of NIH-funded Bigshots,
In the comment section of an earlier post, reader Jonathan Badger criticized us by saying -
Even if you think ENCODE was a waste, do you seriously think cutting scientific funding in general is the answer? Its like the Metro (subway) scandal in the Washington, DC area. The Metro has had a lot of mishaps lately, but cutting its government funding (as some neocon politicans have suggested) isnt going help matters.
The problem is that increased funding of a centralized bureaucracy is not equivalent to supporting basic science. The action actually hurts basic science rather than helping it, and the following one is a good example (apart from Dan Graur losing his funding for criticizing ENCODE).
Everyone working on eukaryotic and especially mammalian translation knows about Kozak consensus sequence. They do not learn what happened to Marilyn Kozak for protesting against bad science of NIH-funded bigshots. She had been ‘disappeared’. This story also shows the decay taking place in many formerly well-respected universities.
Marilyn Kozak is (was?) a remarkable scientist. Her PhD adviser Daniel Nathans mentioned her work in his Nobel prize lecture. As a young professor, she chose a problem that was thought to be already solved years before and came up with the discovery of “Kozak sequence” using method that is now known as ‘bioinformatics’. Her experimental papers were equally impressive, and she was the single author on many of her highly cited papers.
In her original faculty job proposal, she sought to study the mechanism of Eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. [3] While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsburgh, she published a series of work that would establish the scanning model of translation initiation and the Kozak consensus sequence.
The Scientist magazine featured her among the top 10 women scientists of the 80s for her highly cited work.
Joan A. Steitz and Marilyn S. Kozak, ranked fifth and sixth, respectively, are both biochemists.
Kozak, with more than 3,100 citations during the period 1981 to 1988, teaches at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. She is also involved in research that concerns mRNA and eukaryotes. In her most cited paper, which appeared in Nucleic Acids Research in 1984, she noted that as of 1981 scientists were aware of about only 32 cellular mRNA sequences in addition to those she had compiled for a 1981 paper (Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, 93:81-123, 1981). In her 1984 paper, however, Kozak noted that researchers had identified a total of 166an indication of the rapid growth in this field.
Kozak was a highly respected human geneticist, and that later turned out to be her biggest problem. Since 2000, NIH started to push huge amounts of money to study the ‘human genome’. One of the fashionable ideas was IRES (internal ribosome entry site) mechanism discovered in viral genomes, but the money was in ‘going human’. Unfortunately (for Kozak), she questioned the integrity of science in many IRES papers making big claims.
Kozak’s lab was defunded by NIH, and she seem to have completely disappeared. The university email given in her papers bounces, even though Rutgers lists her among the faculty members. The current condition of her department at Rutgers is equally tragic. We called the administrative number to find her latest contact information, but the person responding seemed to never have heard of her. We also tried to contact other professors from the “Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Program” page of Rutgers, but most links go nowhere. The top page of RWJMS is equally uninformative about the list of faculty members. After 10 minutes of struggling through the links, we came to these two pages giving us a snapshot of the biochemistry and molecular biology department. In summary, the department now has three times as many ‘voluntary faculty’ (euphemism for unpaid adjunct PhD) as ‘faculty’. We post the full list of former group below.
Sefik Alkan
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Edward Arnold
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Steven Brill
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Dalia Cohen
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Lori Covey
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Jonathan Dinman
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Leonard Edelstein
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Arthur Felix
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Gianni Garotta
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Raymond Habas
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Florence Kimball
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Christopher Krause
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Michael Leibowitz
M.D., Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Ronald Levy
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
King-Teh Lin
Ph.D. Adjunct Instructor
George Mark, III
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Fred Mermelstein
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Oleg Mermelstein
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Michael Newlon
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Nicola Partridge
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Stuart Peltz
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Margaret Prescott
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Abbas Rashidbaigi
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Danny Reinberg
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Srijata Sarkar
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Gertrud Schupbach
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
John Siekierka
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Victor Stollar
M.D. Adjunct Professor
Yuh-Hwa Wang
Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor
Lawrence Wennogle
Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor
Eric Wieschaus
Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
Robert Zhao
M.D.,Ph.D. Adjunct Professor
In the rest of blogosphere, we found this nice comment from 2007 describing Kozak.
I was lucky enough to take a class with Marilyn Kozak last year.
I’d known a little bit about IRES’s, and in fact had been starting to design uses for them in my own lab work. One of the first things we did in Kozak’s class was discuss the evidence for IRES’s.
At the end of the end of the discussion, I agreed with her that there is no solid evidence for IRES’s. She was not saying that they don’t exist, however, the “evidence” for them looks incredibly sloppy. It should look sloppy to anyone who has not convinced themselves that they definitely exist, and won’t see anything else.
In terms of Marilyn being “antisocial”, she is anything but. How many times have you read an article in a journal, looked at the results, and gone, “they published THIS crap?!” I know I do it on a regular basis, and I don’t have half the reasoning capability and background that Marilyn does. Being asked to review papers written by people who should know better making unfounded conclusions from their data would probably frustrate many people.
I think people who don’t appreciate Marilyn’s criticism are close-minded individuals who shouldn’t call themselves scientists. It’s one thing to not agree with what she says, but to get annoyed at her for raising any questions or bringing up any criticism is lame. What’s the point of peer review except to get feedback and criticism?
And Bayman, was there anything in your comment that was supposed to convince us of the presence of IRES’s? The presence of poly A tracts? That’s it?
