In the March 21st issue of Science, uber-hipster science journalist Elizabeth Pennisi casts a mega-watt investigative bulb on a issue of un-paralleled significance to science. Dying bats? Dying bees? Atmospheric forcing? Higgs particles? Nope. Readers, rally your villagers to take up arms, light torches, and we all storm the monster’s castle at midnight: scientists are fucking up their submissions to the DNA database Genbank, and the computational fungus biologists are pissed about it!
See, apparently anecdotal evidence suggests busy fung-ologists rush to submit their DNA sequences to Genbank (usually at the behest of journals where they want to publish), and erroneously record the precise lineage of species they’ve sequenced. While that’s fine and dandy for bench scientists, it basically threatens to put lazy computational mycologists out of business by making their shitty meta-analyses of databases derived from wet-bench scientist labors (more) FLAWED AND USELESS. And these brats take out their fury in a full letter to the editor from this issue.
Fine, you would say, but the bitchy under-dogs quickly draw support from an all-too-typical source: journalists and editors at scientific journals. This particular heroine, Elisabeth Pennisi, dedicates a whole mind-numbing News and Views article to the subject, mostly because it exposes a pet project issue near and dear to the hearts of journalistico’s and editors: cross-pollinate the bleeding-edge aspects of science, technology and culture, and people will pay attention to you (the journalist) and think you’re out there for the human good (and not just yourself, the journalist). In short, she portrays the fung-ists efforts as a step to “Wiki-fy” our bioinformatics databases…and who could possibly take issue with that ever-so-reasonable stance?
But alas, in any story like this there must be a villain, and Pennisi goes pretty far afield to find a reliable arch-enemy: computational biologists at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)! These bastards have long suppressed the hopes and dreams of sequence analyzers and Perl-sters, and are not nearly as good looking as their European counterparts. Bunkered down in their bomb-proof fortress headquaters, the fascist IT-ers quash the hearts of all Wiki-wannabes, and spew invective from bullhorns to the effect of “I think it will be solved eventually…” Indeed, NCBI-ists, we have heard this all before…but usually from the Reichstag.
Feisty Commie Fascists and their victims aside, Pennisi ignores how the Genbank databases pussy-whip the size, scope and growth of something as puny as English Wikipedia, which at the moment could still squeeze onto a double-sided DVD and leave room for a Farrelly brothers film. Also, she fails to mention the daily horrors involved in maintaining accuracy of open-media repositories, the worst examples of which seem to involve the very people who exercise most control over the resource. Remember, bioinformatics databases are already complex enough to be interesting at the GooglePlex and they are heroically stewarded by a miserly user-base who, if chopped up and made into stew, couldn’t feed but a fraction of the maniac denizens who argue in the annals of Wikipedia.
Pennisi wastes our time in tromping out a predictable lede and faux-dramatology structure to point out an issue that will be resolved over coffee by a few computer scientists at a conference session break. If you think we’re just being ornery and unfair to fair Elizabeth, then read on to very next Letter to the Editor, which dutifully wrestles with another News and Views pertaining to a somewhat more troublesome issue and organism, Plasmodium.
