Highlighting genomes for DNA Day 2016
Today is national DNA day, celebrating the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 and the publication of the proposed structure of DNA in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick (PDF here). Read more
Sex in Science
This is a guest blog post by Prof. Eleftheria Zeggini. Ele trained in Biochemistry (BSc) and Immunogenetics (PhD) in Manchester, UK, before undertaking a post doc and subsequently a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship in Oxford. She joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and is on the Human Genetics Faculty. Ele’s scientific interests focus on the genetics of complex traits, primarily cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal phenotypes, and on addressing relevant statistical genetics issues. She also leads the Wellcome Genome Campus-wide Sex in Science programme (https://www.sanger.ac.uk/workstudy/sexinscience/), which engages a wide base of scientists and drives policy and practice change. Read more
Double-blind peer review
In this month’s editorial, Nature Genetics announces a new option available to authors at all monthly Nature Research Journals. Authors will now be able to opt in to double-blind peer review, so that anonymous reviewers will not have access to the authors’ identities. It will be the authors’ responsibility to make sure that their identities are removed from the manuscript. The decision to implement this option was made based on surveys of the scientific community and researcher feedback. What do you think of double-blind peer review? Will you choose this option for your own manuscripts? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments section below. Read more
Mentoring for success in science
On November 14, the Junior Faculty at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, together with Nature Genetics, hosted a workshop for early-career researchers about mentoring in the sciences. The goal of the workshop was to identify what postdocs and new faculty members wanted from a potential mentor and how the institute could go about establishing a formal mentoring program. The workshop was a direct result of a previous workshop at KI, also co-organized by Nature Genetics. A commentary about that workshop can be found here. Read more
NIH Common Fund song & video contests
“We want to know whether our future baby’s health is based on genes or the environment.” This is a concern shared by a lot of would-be parents for sure, and is the question posed to Dr. M. Elizabeth Ross at the beginning of this short video. The video, made by the labs of Dr. Ross and Dr. Christopher E. Mason at Weill Cornell Medical College is part of a competition sponsored by the NIH to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Common Fund. Read more