A brief hiatus

By -
Apologies for not posting anything recently. I have something in the works at BigThink and a few more in the pipeline but it has been hard finding the time to blog recently. I hope to be back to it in a couple of weeks.

Comments

  1. NeuroskepticSeptember 22, 2011 at 11:53 PM

    Looking forward to seeing your BigThoughts :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 25, 2011 at 6:18 AM

    You don't have to worry about it. I know that it is quite hard to give enough time to blog something. It takes a lot of time that why I am impressed with sites like xlpharmacy facts because they are adding content constantly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WikiFebruary 14, 2012 at 10:05 AM

    If you want to make your free website I think you need free flash templates .

    Free flash intos is one of the best free flash effects that you need.

    ReplyDelete
  4. diana austinMarch 26, 2013 at 7:34 AM

    Enormous statistics I like your post. It is good to see you express from the heart and accuracy on this important subject can be easily captured here.
    MBA Thesis Writing

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grandma’s trauma – a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans

By -
Image
Can molecular memories of our ancestors’ experiences affect our own behaviour and physiology? That idea has certainly grabbed hold of the public imagination, under the banner of the seemingly ubiquitous buzzword “epigenetics”. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is the idea that a person’s experiences can somehow mark their genomes in ways that are passed on to their children and grandchildren. Those marks on the genome are then thought to influence gene expression and affect the behaviour and physiology of people who inherit them. 
The way this notion is referred to – both in popular pieces and in the scientific literature – you’d be forgiven for thinking it is an established fact in humans, based on mountains of consistent, compelling evidence. In fact, the opposite is true – it is based on the flimsiest of evidence from a very small number of studies with very small sample sizes and serious methodological flaws. [Note that there is, by contrast, very good evidence for this kind…
Read more

Calibrating scientific skepticism – a wider look at the field of transgenerational epigenetics

By -
Image
I recently wrote a blogpost examining the supposed evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TGEI) in humans. This focused specifically on a set of studies commonly cited as convincingly demonstrating the phenomenon whereby the experiences of one generation can have effects that are transmitted, through non-genetic means, to their offspring, and, more importantly, even to their grandchildren. Having examined what I considered to be the most prominent papers making these claims, I concluded that they do not in fact provide any evidence supporting that idea, as they are riddled with fatal methodological flaws.
While the scope of that piece was limited to studies in humans, I have also previously considered animal studies making similar claims, which suffer from similar methodological flaws (here and here). My overall conclusion is that there is effectively no evidence for TGEI in humans (contrary to widespread belief) and very little in mammals more generally (with one very…
Read more

Lessons for human genetics from genetic screens in model organisms

By -
Image
Why did the axon cross the midline? That seems like a simple enough biological problem to solve. In the developing nervous system, especially in the anatomically simple spinal cord, some nerve cells send a slender nerve fibre (called an axon) across the midline of the nervous system to connect to cells on the other side. The projections of other neurons are restricted to the same side as their own cell bodies. The connections between the two sides are crucial in coordinating movement of the two sides of the body. But, more importantly for this discussion, this system is simple enough to be genetically tractable – at least it seems so.
When I arrived as a graduate student in the lab of Corey Goodman at the University of California at Berkeley, his group had just carried out a genetic screen in fruit flies to try and understand how this developmental decision was controlled. Flies have an equivalent of a spinal cord, called the ventral nerve cord, and Corey and his colleagues had spent m…
Read more