RabbitAngstrom

Following the source -- excellent idea. I bet most of the rest of his class has a similar searchability...

Perhaps the "beer" subtext is just more about being exclusive (beer nerds welcome here) versus inclusive. What if instead the same event was going out to a bar, where you can order a whiskey, cosmopolitan or soda?

I think it fits into the greater "culture" of a workplace, and is at most a symptom of the problem and not the answer. If a CTO thinks his ads are appearing "sexist," the problem must go deeper than the keg in the break room (which is just the most obvious sign of immaturity.)

Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I went to an Ivy League School (Penn) on just straight-As and 700s (!) on the SATs. I was not a "legacy" student of any kind. I knew many such people there, and only about 10% of my colleagues admitted to being a legacy -- maybe it was just my social circle? Or that I didn't major at Wharton, which is stereotypically legacy?

Your point about graduate school is spot on, though. The game completely changes (though I think it's still mostly a game). I especially love the "don't buy this muffler..." quote!

IVF doesn't actually change the genetic makeup of the sperm or egg in question. To do so would create a genetically altered human.

Once you are born with synthetic DNA, is it not "existing in nature?" An interesting point, but cloning is not very popular among bioethicists.

Not a patent lawyer, but I would think that

1)the ruling focuses in on retrieval of how DNA is naturally stored, which is more or less the same in all organisms

2)you can replicate just about any gene, either chemically or via PCR. The form is definitely "snythesis," and I would assume the latter is as well but I do not know the law offhand.

A co-worker in my lab pointed out that Myriad's stock is actually rising[1] after the decision.The best guess is that Myriad's competitive advantage is shifting to the enormous amounts of BRCA sequences they have obtained -- this would increase the cancer-vs-normal mutation prediction power considerably.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?cid=658315

Interesting point; in the scientific community some are quite honored by being chosen as a peer reviewer. It's like a rite of passage.

The only difference I can see is that the YouTube/Facebook reviewer title is a lot easier to come by. I thought it more akin to Amazon Vine, but at least then you get to keep the things you test!

Also, I have seen wholly unreviewed material in Nature Precedings, which I can only assume is due to the pressure of being scooped. As you might imagine, non-peer-reviewed scientific literature is the antithesis of the research culture, and the few colleagues who have mentioned Precedings have done so with distaste.

You got it: when you follow the money, it's clear why this article is happening. Journals have long used free labor for peer review and editing, and rake in the money with subscriptions (paywalls) and advertising.

The most impacted journals, in my estimation, will be the smaller ones that make no money via advertising or editorial. And there are hundreds (thousands?) of small journals to every Nature or Science.

This is my first reaction too, but then I must remember that it's free to publish in Nature (and Science, et. al.) because of their massive readership. I don't think they'll go anywhere for a long time, because people will always want a prestigious place to put their research.