Midget, Foreign Geneticists Reek With Envy, Desire Freedom Fries

Puns aside, today has certainly been a “big” day in human genetics. Following the initial discovery of isolated human genetic variants that affect height, several new reports in Nature Genetics isolate as many as twenty common loci that may provide yet another explaination why your child will never get into Harvard, or make enough to pay for your retirement.  In the midst of culling through the finding, however, the Pasigraph noted an interesting geopolitical aside in some data: glory be, even PhD trained Europeans still love America, and would dock their boats at the ledge of the Statue of Liberty in a heartbeat.

 

While seeking out Hipster-worthy dubs to describe their findings, a consortia based in the stuffy UK has relented to calling one particular vantage point of common variant studies “The Manhattan Plot“. So either it’s hard to remember any islands in Europe which are longer than they are tall, or Euros still yearn to conduct their useless science in a place where costs woefully outstrip the puny remittance they receive to decipher the genes responsible for Shaquille O’Neal.

The Pasigraph notes this isn’t the first time we’ve seen city-envy creep into scientific forums…we diligently referred to the last metastasis we had as “going Uptown“.

 

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Minor Observations in Science Reported This Week

 

1988:

“It is likely [expression of a single gene] in a fibroblast is sufficient to confer V(D)J recombinase activity on that cell”

“Our data suggest that transcriptional inactivation or post-transcriptional down-regulation of the RB gene may be important in the etiology of some osteosarcomas and soft tissue sarcomas as well as retinoblastomas.”

 1978:

“…the state of the virus DNA in transformed cells is different from that of DNA in virus particles”

“Whether further translocation of [insulin] occurs is unclear and has not been investigated by direct means…”

 1968:

“It would be useful if computers could learn from experience and thus automatically improve the efficiency of their own programs during execution.”

“Astrocytes in cultures of brain cells from fetal or newborn hamsters undergo neoplastic transformation after infection with simian virus 40 or polyoma virus”

Pasigraphy

As with many good things, this started under a full moon at the foot of a bar after too many drinks. We are here under a single purpose, but need all your help. Our tongue is the universal tongue, which will remain when all are in the ground and we are discovered again by another civilization. Yet today, our language of science exists buried within cultures, religions, tongues and tails which exceed anyone’s immediate comprehension. Here is where we come to speak in native tongue.

We are tired of rejected manuscripts containing the works of our lives. We cringe having received our latest grant review. We glance at the corporate roll-out plan and the next round of financing, and recoil in how it evades our fundamental purpose. As the public consumes our technology, we furrow our eyebrows at their increasing unknowing of the black boxes we craft.

Put another way, this is a passage and community about science. We will eviscerate editorial boards. We will lean on peer review. We will poke holes in corporate wisdom and profitability outlooks. We will gossip about who our advisors and co-workers are sleeping with, and who obtains faculty positions because of that. Generally, we will be the skeptics we trained to be, the objectivists we need to be, and the rational thinkers we are required to be.

So, don’t post your comments to a major journal, or bitch about your referee critiques over coffee. Don’t write an annual review of your manager, or funnel your energies in the patent that might never come. Instead, start here and enjoy the language of science at its highest, and raise the dialogue where you may. Help us create the a lingua that will always remain franca; join the pasigraph.