Ford Doolittle's Critique of ENCODE

Ford Doolittle has never been one to shy away from controversy so it's not surprising that he weighs in against the misleading publicity campaign launched by ENCODE leaders last September (Doolittle, 2013). Recall that Ewan Birney and other prominent members of the consortium promoted the idea that our genome contained an extensive array of regulatory elements and that 80% of our genome was functional [Ewan Birney: Genomics' Big Talker] [ENCODE Leader Says that 80% of Our Genome Is Functional] [The ENCODE Data Dump and the Responsibility of Scientists].

This is the fourth paper that's critical of the ENCODE hype. The first was Sean Eddy's paper in Current Biology (Eddy, 2012). The second was a paper by Niu and Jiang (2012), and the third was a paper by Graur et al. (2013). In my experience this is unusual since the critiques are all directed at how the ENCODE Consortium interpreted their data and how they misled the scientific community (and the general public) by exaggerating their results. Those kind of criticisms are common in journal clubs and, certainly, in the blogosphere, but scientific journals generally don't publish them. It's okay to refute the data (as in the arsenic affair) but ideas usually get a free pass no matter how stupid they are.

In this case, the ENCODE Consortium did such a bad job of describing their data that journals had to pay attention. (It helps that much of the criticism is directed at Nature and Science because the other journals want to take down the leaders!)

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Posted in: Evolutionary Biology, Genes, Genome