Now that we are on the very last day of 2021, it is not too late to review the positives of the year. I picked four categories (humor, science, society, technology) and shortlisted a tiny subset from many deserving candidates.
A newly leaked classified document revealed that scandal-ridden Francis Collins plans to change his name to continue running the NIH. He got the idea by observing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is rebranding himself to be a reptilian.
Things are not going well with our friends in biology. In a new paper published in PLoS Biology, a
bigshot from Baylor College of Medicine called for all criticisms of biologists be legally labeled as “hate crimes”. He appears to be upset that people found out about the sponsorship of Wuhan lab by Fauci and Daszak to make new and deadly coronaviruses.
Lately “Sir” Jeremy Farrar, the disgraced director of Wellcome Trust, is not having a good time. In a pair of scathing articles (here and here), British medical journal BMJ criticized his efforts of covering up the origin of the covid virus. If similar articles were posted merely two months back by “fringe” bioinformatics sites like ours, they would be discredited as “conspiracy theories” and blocked by the Silicon valley giants. Given that UK’s oldest medical journal wrote on this topic in its editorial, the wind must be blowing in a different direction.
In the early days of Biorxiv, I was a strong supporter of the fledgling preprint server (see here and here. After using the physics preprint server (Arxiv) in my past life, I thought Biorxiv would become something similar and encourage the biologists to collaborate openly. Although I had lingering doubts about the biologists switching from their secretive mode of worrying about getting scooped to sharing openly, never did I expect the preprint server itself to turn into a gated community.
You may have heard part of this story, where Marilyn Monroe told Einstein - “Would it not be wonderful if we had a child with your brains and my beauty?” Einstein replied promptly: “Yes, but imagine a child with my beauty and your brains!”
The world of software crowdsourcing is experiencing a new threat that is far more serious than the existing nuisances (e.g. dependency hell, heartbleed bug). In it, a malicious programmer included code in a popular and widely deployed Javascript library to steal cryptocurrency wallets. To explain the significance, let me quickly review the history of this model for software development.
For many years, bioinformaticians were defining the publishing trend in biology. This started with the influx of physicists around the completion of human genome project. I remember from early 2000s, when my papers with physicists went straight to preprint servers before publication, whereas the papers with biologists had to go through military-level secrecy. Biologists were not ready to share their papers even with close friends due to the fear of “getting scooped”.
A couple of warnings before we begin - (i) this article is for entertainment purpose only and no part of it should be considered an investment advice, (ii) we have no financial position in the mentioned companies.
A couple of warnings before we begin - (i) this article is for entertainment purpose only and no part of it should be considered an investment advice, (ii) we have no financial position in the mentioned companies.
Often I download newly published bioinformatics programs or libraries from the github into my Windows laptop and try to compile them within its Cygwin UNIX environment. Over the years, I noticed that those C/C++ codes tend to fall into two distinct categories -
In his recent budget, President Trump proposed to reduce taxes wasted in the
NIH Money Pit sinkhole by twenty percent. Such a big cut will most likely
not be approved by the Congress, because the political stars are aligning against it.
The economic stars, on the other hand, are aligned in favor of drastic reduction of NIH
funding in the coming
years. We explained why in a post written four years ago. Shutting down parts of NIH, or even the entire agency, will
not be an unmitigated disaster for science, and if at all, will be beneficial. We made an appeal
to close NHGRI in “Let’s Discuss - Is it Time to Shut Down NHGRI?” and also wrote - “How Much Will the Americans Suffer, If NIH Shuts Down?”.
Every once in a while, we use Google search to find links to old posts in our blog.
The method seemed to have worked without failure until today. Today we were looking
for an earlier post critical of a paper by Francis Collins and Google never gave us the link,
no matter how hard we searched for it. It is noteworthy that even after typing
the entire title and adding ‘homolog.us’ on the search box, we do not find the
relevant post anywhere in the first several pages of the Google results.
Is some organization paying Google to block our posts critical of NIH?
We present the evidence from four search engines (google, duckduckgo, bing, yahoo). You
explain what is going on.
Apologies to the readers for not being able to make this week’s scheduled posts.
Instead I am posting an entertaining essay on the birth of molecular biology.
It is from a autobiographical book published in 1976. Any guessing the author
will earn 99.99 homolog.us points :).
We are back after making extensive changes to the blog software being used here.
Most important among the changes, we got rid of Wordpress and made a commitment to
never use Wordpress again. Wordpress is easy to install, but nightmare to maintain
with its entire panoply of buggy plugins. Moreover, it sucks up time by failing at the
most unfortunate times.
A large number of NIH-funded parasites waste taxpayers’
money with the excuse that they are working
toward improving the health of Americans. Francis Collins, the head of NIH,
uses every opportunity to tell everyone how research funded by NIH helps in
improving the life expectancy of Americans (a flat out lie). Yet, when
research by Deaton and Case uncovered that the life expectancy of Americans of
prime age (45-54) was falling, primarily due to rising suicides, Collins and
his minions went completely silent.
