Monday Links

I haven't done this in a while:

Below the fold you'll find links to an interview with Alan Parker editor of Nature Genetics, Boltzmann and entropy, Big Biology, Tanzanian society (as seen through a medstudent from the west) and a note on affirmative action.

Hsien Hsien Lei of Genetics and Health interviews Alan Parker, editor of Nature Genetics. Here's an excerpt (re:open access):

As for Nature, my guess is that it will remain a 'reader pays' journal for the foreseeable future. The primary reason is that it costs a great deal of money to produce. One thing that may not be apparent from the outside is what it takes to produce a journal with the richness of filtering, content, and context that Nature offers, both in print and online. The people who look at the numbers make the argument that the amount of money each author would have to be charged to in order to meet this cost would be prohibitive. I'm not privy to those numbers, but I do see the scale of the operation every day, and I'm not at all surprised by this conclusion. That said, I'm not sure I would use the word 'stubborn' to describe Nature's position. A lot of people here have taken a good hard look at the different publishing models. There is a journal under the NPG umbrella called Molecular Systems Biology that is open access (author pays), which is in part an experiment to see if such a publishing model really is viable in the long run. There is also a great deal of NPG content that is freely available, and if you go through the 'subject area' pages, you'll see it. We're also a member of HINARI, a consortium of publishers that provides low cost access to the journals in countries whose GDP is below a certain level.

I've always been fascinated by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and there is a great discussion of this, Boltzmann and the Big Bang by Sean Carrol at Cosmicvariance.

Boltzmann's understanding [of the statistical nature of the 2nd law of thermodynamics] led to both a deep puzzle and an unexpected consequence. The microscopic definition explained why entropy would tend to increase, but didn't offer any insight into why it was so low in the first place. Suddenly, a thermodynamics problem became a puzzle for cosmology: why did the early universe have such a low entropy?

More Big Biology discussions at Sinking the Iceberg.

Large consortiums that just allow PIs to expand their research empires without using dramatically different techniques definitely don't seem like the best use of funding to me. I do believe that individual labs offer great opportunities for innovation, but at the same time, systems biology approaches that allow you to get a sense of how a whole network fits together can also result in important discoveries and speed up the process of identifying key genes. In this way, such systems approaches also create fodder for many smaller projects. I think ideally, big biology and small biology would complement each other to build up knowledge of how organisms work on different scales, just as eg structural, biochemical and cell biological approaches can work together. The challenge is obviously to find the right balance.

On a diffenrent note, my good friend The Tall Medstudent just got back from a stint working in a medical clinic in Tanzania:

This place is weird. Today I saw a girl of about five, recovering from a lion bite. I wondered what was worse, being bitten by a lion, or being in hospital...

His entries on Tanzania are great, I encourage you to read some of his recent posts:

I think I've already mentioned how the setup of society in Tanzania was so shocking to me. The education systems and health care systems are set up in such a way as to deny the lowest classes the possibility of hope. Education beyond primary school is priced beyond the means of a large percentage of the population, and health care is another problem altogether.

He also wrote a letter to Bil The Man, (posted at Bils blog, Rambling Thoughts of the Prof Bil the Man) and it echoes much of these thoughts:

There's a total dichotomy between the rich and poor, like I've never experienced. If you're rich, you have tons of servants who work for you for about $50 a month, you've got a nice SUV or two or three, you have access to all the nicest beaches and restaurants, your kids all go to school in the UK, you have great hospitals. If you're poor, you get 'free' education up to grade 7 or so, except that there are fees of about $100 a year, which isn't so easy for parents to afford on their $50 a month salary. After that, high school is something like
$100 a term, plus about $600 in expenses. So, no high school for just about anyone black. Health care costs $20 to see a doctor, then you have to pay all test costs, drug costs, surgical costs, etc. So, nobody from the lower class goes to the doctor until they're about to die. The situation seems absolutely hopeless for the typical person.

On a different note, Bil (as an academic who is a member of a "minority" group) discusses affirmitive action:

I can tell you that I came up in this society and race has always been a factor in every aspect of my life. If it hasn't been for you, frankly, I don't care about your opinion. Also, if you want to change Affirmative action we need to make all of our schools and communities equal. That may never happen completely but at least we can try to get them closer. Schools should be a national problem not a local problem. If we all work to change the inequalities in our public schools we will eliminate the problems of inequality.