Science hype it up

"First genome transplant turns one species into another".

Wow! Really? That sounds amazing!!

"Scientists have converted an organism into an entirely different species by performing the world's first genome transplant, a breakthrough that paves the way for the creation of synthetic forms of life".

No kidding! "An entirely different species"?! What was it, turning a whale into a petunia!?!

And it's a paper in Science!?

This must be big!!!!!

Wait for it....

Here it is..........

"In the experiment, researchers extracted the whole genetic code from a simple bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. They squirted the DNA into a test tube containing a related species, Mycoplasma capricolum. They found that some of the bacteria absorbed the new genome and ditched their own. These microbes grew and behaved exactly like the donor".

Oh.

Can I piss on their fire now?

These mycoplasma are very closely related:

"The members of the M. mycoides cluster are very closely related, as judged from biochemical, physiological, serological, and 16S rRNA sequence data, but cause different diseases in various animals. M. capricolum subsp. capripneumoniae has a property unique among members of the M. mycoides cluster in that it has an unusually large number of polymorphisms in the two 16S rRNA genes. There are, in fact, more sequence differences between the rrnA and rrnB operons of M. capricolum subsp. capripneumoniae than between the 16S rRNA genes of homologous operons of different species within the M. mycoides cluster. This characteristic can possibly be explained by more rapid evolution due to a relatively recent change to a host to which this mycoplasma has not completely adapted".

Note: "relatively recent change". And M. capricolum is more diverse than M. mycoides, so you might expect these cells to be able to take up M. mycoides genomes. They're practically the same species. Bacteria are quite fuzzy about species anyway.

It is an interesting experiment, but this has been hyped up beyond a joke.

CNS disease, or [ney-cher-sahy-uhns-uhnd-sel]

I've read some comments to the effect that PLoS ONE is a new competitor to Nature. You know who you are. The confusion appears to be wrought by the fact that PLoS ONE is a general science journal, but in reality it is poles apart from Nature, Science or Cell. If Nature is aiming to be at the tip of the publications pyramid, PLoS ONE is the broad base, much as the BMC series is also part of the broad base. And that's a Good Thing.

Harold Varmus has complained about ‘CNS disease’, the tendency to regard publication in these journals too highly. These three journals are mentioned in one breath so often that perhaps a new word could be coined: naturescienceandcell /ˈneɪtʃər/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ney-cher-sahy-uhns-uhnd-sel] -noun: 1. General science journals that cause researchers to temporarily lose their sanity.

Jan Velterop estimates that 1 million scholarly articles are published each year, and I read somewhere this week that there were around 680,000 abstracts added to PubMed in 2005, so that estimate looks reasonable. A quick look at PubMed tells me that the hallowed trio of Nature, Science and Cell between them published in the ballpark of 3,000 research articles that year. As only around 0.5% of publications appear in these journals, the attention paid to them is a little bit unwarranted. I'd wager that at least some of the other 99.5% of articles have some merit.

In a similar vein, Doug Altman has pointed out that although randomized controlled trials in general medical journals get such attention paid to them, 93% of trials are not published in general medical journals and 90% of medical publications are not trials. The focus on these "big headline" RCTs that make up 0.7% of the medical literature appears to be due to reprints being bought by pharmaceutical companies -- the Vioxx article by Merck brought in $700,000 to the NEJM -- and due to what Ben Goldacre calls Humanities Graduates In The Media hyping medical stories in the press.

It is worth remembering that although these journals have high impact factors, the impact factor doesn't determine the number of citations an article published in a journal will receive: the causation is the other way around. To their credit, Nature have been honest about the fact that their 2004 impact factor mainly (89% of it) derived from 25% of their articles, including the mouse genome paper that has been cited over 1,000 times. Not all articles published in Nature receive that kind of response, yet people still refer to Nature publications in awed tones. Some people might "read" Nature each week, but, seriously, does anyone actually read the research articles if they're not in the field?

Science depends more on a slow and steady accumulation of knowledge than upon "breakthrough" papers. Geoff Watts has argued in the BMJ that we should "pension off the major breakthrough". I'd echo this, and I'd agree with Harold Varmus: we need a cure for CNS disease.