Talk:Ewan Birney

junk dna ENCODE controversy

Recently, the ENCODE results and associated publicity campaign (stories run by most major news outlets) has in large part centered around Birney and the assertion that junk DNA is discredited (i.e. that the majority of the human genome has "function", defined as the thing ENCODE measures).

For example, in the Sept.2012 issue [1] of Science magazine, Elizabeth Pennisi has written two three page articles: "(News Focus: Profile: Ewan Birney) Genomics' Big Talker" together with "(News & Analysis: Genomics) ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA".

However, other experts have responded scathingly, for example:

• Toronto Biochemistry Professor Laurence A. Moran has described this as a "fiasco" and said "[Ewan Birney] has almost single-handedly* damaged the reputation of 400 scientists in the ENCODE Consortium and he did it, in part, because he was not knowledgeable about his own field of expertise!"[2].
• Minnesota Biology associate-prof PZ Myers said "I don’t think Birney has a clue about the biology.[...] If one of Birney’s goals was to make ENCODE “comprehensible to the general public”, I can’t imagine a better example of a colossal catastrophe. Not only does the public and media fail to understand what ENCODE was about, but they’ve instead grasped only the completely erroneous misinterpretation that Birney put front and center in his summary.[...] The creationists are overjoyed, and regard Birney’s bogus claims about the data as a vindication"[3]
• Guelph biologist T. Ryan Gregory endorsed the comment "Birney: “For me, the driving concern was to avoid over-hyping the medical applications…” Really? You mean like when you helped Nature produce a video cartoon in which ENCODE is presented as a mega-robot that destroys cancer and heart disease by punching it very hard? [....]"[4]
• Nature quoted Moran's criticism[5], Scientific American published an article titled "Junk DNA, Junky PR"[6], North County Times reported on "Birney’s semantic switch"[7], Huffingtonpost published "ENCODE [..measured..] biochemical landmarks[..which..] do not by themselves demonstrate that a region of the genome is doing something useful for us. This distinction was obscured by the press releases put out by ENCODE, and largely lost on most of the reporters who covered the story. [..] The widely reported claim of debunked junk DNA is simply wrong."[8], HHMI Group Leader Sean Eddy said "ENCODE calls a piece of DNA “functional” if it reproducibly binds to a DNA-binding protein, is reproducibly marked by a specific chromatin modification, or if it is transcribed. OK. That’s a fine, measurable operational definition. (One might wonder, why not just call “DNA replication” a function too, and define 100% of the genome as biochemically functional, but of course, as Ewan Birney (the ENCODE czar) would tell you, I would never be that petty. No sir.) [..] But as far as questions of “junk DNA” are concerned, ENCODE’s definition isn’t relevant at all. The “junk DNA” question is about how much DNA has essentially no direct impact on the organism’s phenotype – roughly, what DNA could I remove (if I had the technology) and still get the same organism. [...] if you made a piece of junk for yourself — a completely random DNA sequence! — [..] ENCODE would call the RNA transcript of your random DNA junk “functional”, by their technical definition."[9], etc..

This situation is widely reported in mainstream media (therefore notable), and we have easy access to numerous authorative sources, so it seems worth mentioning in the article. Cesiumfrog (talk) 00:20, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Ewan's biography

The summary of Ewan's biography as corrected in April 2013 to reflect his change of position at EMBL-EBI. This was done alongside updates to the EMBL-EBI website, which were checked for accuracy by a number of people at EMBL-EBI. Further details are associated with the changes themselves Themarytodd (talk) 11:27, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

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