Category Archives: Randomness

Batman, Blockbusters, and Biopharma

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All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

This blogging thing is interesting.  I’m discovering one of the challenges with blogging on a regular basis is the back and forth tidal pull between length/quality and speed/relevance.  There are measured, thought-out, lengthy pieces I’m working on about things and concepts I am interested in exploring.  But at the same time I find myself responding to current events that spark a thought and connection, an Aha! moment, with quick reaction pieces.  Finding that balance is tough, especially since I like both kinds of writing and think they add to the general blog environment that I’m trying to create.  And time is limited.  In a given week I shoot for maybe 3+ posts, in an effort not to get too burnt out or disenchanted in the way described by Chuq van Rospach.  Sometimes, though, a combination of thoughts, articles and other bits of information come together and I find myself staying up to pound out those 500 or 1000 words to capture an idea in the moment.  All for the benefit of the 3 or so people who will skim this post, plus the random butt-click registered by some poodle sitting on an iPad.

But whatever.

So, Batman. Continue reading →

Enter citizen science

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All opinions my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

h/t to @engagedethics for the heads up.

What do you think of when you think of citizen science?  Maybe dads buying Geek Dad and helping their kids build Lego robots that can manipulate a lego binary clock.  Maybe people tracking their health, thoughts, bodies, or other things in a really granular way in an effort to get at their quantified self.  Maybe hobbyists building and flying drones to sample atmospheric particle levels or track neighborhood traffic patterns.  Maybe patients groups banding together and funding research into cures, like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation did with Kalydeco.  Maybe birdwatchers helping researchers track the migration patterns and populations of North American birds.  Maybe it’s something else, something you know about or have heard about or are planning to do right now.  Choose any or all of the above and you’re completely right.

Because citizen science, like a lot of movements these days, isn’t something legislated or codified or directed from on high. It’s something organic and crowd-based and bottom up, and it’s going on everywhere.

This is the world that’s being enabled by technology.  Whether it’s 3D printing, DIY Bio, computer modeling, personal monitoring or other kinds of tools, the barriers to experimentation are falling rapidly, and interest in figuring stuff out is on the rise.

The Citizens Science Association has been working on ways to support this new way of doing science.  They’ve been convening groups to look at topics like Governance, Conferences, ways to publish, and ways to communicate via other means.  There will be a webinar on September 17th to report on progress and it sounds like a worthwhile thing to listen to.  I haven’t been involved in the Association, but I’m planning to listen in.  Because technology keeps lowering the barriers to entry, and I’m really excited to see what comes out.

Lack of replication no surprise when we’re studying really complex problems

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All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

For another nice take on this topic see Paul Knoepfler’s blog post here.

One of the sacred (can I say sacred in reference to something scientific?) tenets of the scientific method is reproducibility.  If something is real and measurable, if it’s a fact of the material world, then the expectation is that the result should be reproducible by another experimenter using the same methods as described in the original report.  One of the most well known (among physicists anyway) examples of irreproducible data is the Valentine’s Day Magnetic Monopole detected by Blas Cabrera back in 1982.  Great experimental data.  Never repeated, and therefore viewed as insufficient proof for the existence of a magnetic monopole.

So it’s troubling that in the past few years there have been numerous stories about the lack of reproducibility for different scientific experiments.  In biomedical science the number of  reports on the difficulty of reproducing results has gotten so great that the NIH has begun thinking about how to confirm and require reproducibility of some kinds of experimental results.  Just a few days ago another field, that of psychological priming, saw the publication of an article that the effects of “high-performance priming,” could not be reproduced.  This is another field undergoing serious questioning about whether/why results don’t reproduce, with commentary from such luminaries as Daniel Kahneman. Continue reading →

Are market cap and present cash flows the best way to measure innovation?

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All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

Forbes, with the help of the folks from The Innovator’s DNA recently published their coverage and rankings of the 100 most innovative companies.  I’m particularly interested in their ranking method, as it contains elements that are near and dear to my heart–namely, metrics and crowdsourcing.  In a nutshell, they describe how they use a company’s current market capitalization, along with it’s current net present value based on cashflows, to extrapolate how much the market feels the company has in potential.  The method nicely incorporates crowdsourcing in that the market cap measures how much investors as a whole think a company is really worth, now and in the future, and if that’s higher than expected based on cashflow, that suggests investors are factoring in a bonus to value based on future expectations.  Higher future expectations are interpreted as investors seeing a particular company as innovative and having the potential for great leaps forward in offerings and/or income.

I really like using the crowd in this way, and would love to see an analysis that retrospectively looks at these kinds of values over, say, 1970-1990, and combines that with a mature assessment of which companies have been adjudged by business historians to truly have been innovative standouts, which is not the same as business successes.  We say now that Bell Labs was one of the most innovative places on the planet in the 1900s.  Would the same have been said at the time?

At the same time, I can’t help musing if this process couldn’t be made even better.  Recognizing innovation when it’s happening has obvious advantages for anyone looking to get into the next amazing thing, whether as a participant, an investor, or a policy maker.  So let’s start by examining where there might be shortfalls to the Innovator’s DNA method. Continue reading →

What does the Hela genome agreement imply for consent and genome data usage?

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All opinions my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

A fair amount of reporting (for example here, here and here) has gone into the recent news that the NIH and the descendants of Henrietta Lacks have reached an agreement about the conditions under which the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line will be shared.  The basic parameters are that researchers wanting access to the data will need to apply for permission, the application committee will include members of the Lacks family, any publications will acknowledge the contribution of the Henrietta Lacks, and future genome sequences will be submitted to dbGAP.

This is a generally welcome development, and in no small part due to the work of Rebecca Skloot.  Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks provided the impetus to the current developments by popularizing the story of Ms. Lacks and the cell line derived from her tissues.  However, this agreement also can be seen as a precedent of sorts, and the future implications for the ethics of consent, genetic information sharing and genomic research are unclear.

Whose genome is it, anyway?

In Pasco Phronesis, David Bruggeman penned a post on some of the possible implications.  He discusses one of the key elements of genetic consent that I generally haven’t seen elaborated on much in the current literature: familial consent and exposure.   To what extent do those who share part of a sequenced genome have a say in the granting and rescinding of consent for the usage of genetic information?   Continue reading →