nodalpoint.org

The last chapter of Craig Venter's version of Celera has been written. Via Universal Acid: Celera has given up trying to sell genomic information. The end result is that all their genomic data will be put in the public domain. Which is I guess, a good thing...

As much a reminder to myself as a spur for the rest of you...

Can it be the end of April already? Where does the time go? More importantly, get thinking about your next submission for "Bioinformatics paper of the month" in 2 days time.

Hello World.

I Have a question for the fine people here, and I am a rank amateur, so please excuse my lack of proper vocabulary.

I've been trying to find the whole story on a case which I read about several years ago- I think it was possibly in John L. Casti's "Paradigms Lost", or possibly Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct".

In any case, the example refers to a "famous experiment" which is often referred to as "[so-and-so's] Monster", in which, a microorganism is placed in an extremely hospitible environment and allowed to thrive there with no enemies or inhibition. After many generations of reproduction in this safe environment, the organism was found to have a markedly less-complex genetic structure.