Talk:Ewan Birney

This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.

If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page.

Biography: Science and Academia

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group.

University of Oxford Low‑importance

	University of Oxford portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject University of Oxford, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the University of Oxford on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.University of OxfordWikipedia:WikiProject University of OxfordTemplate:WikiProject University of OxfordUniversity of Oxford articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Molecular Biology: COMPBIO Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Molecular Biology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Molecular Biology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Molecular BiologyWikipedia:WikiProject Molecular BiologyTemplate:WikiProject Molecular BiologyMolecular Biology articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Computational Biology task force (assessed as Low-importance).

junk dna ENCODE controversy

Recently, the ENCODE results and associated publicity campaign (stories run by most major news outlets) has in large part centered around Birney and the assertion that junk DNA is discredited (i.e. that the majority of the human genome has "function", defined as the thing ENCODE measures).

For example, in the Sept.2012 issue [1] of Science magazine, Elizabeth Pennisi has written two three page articles: "(News Focus: Profile: Ewan Birney) Genomics' Big Talker" together with "(News & Analysis: Genomics) ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA".

However, other experts have responded scathingly, for example:

Toronto Biochemistry Professor Laurence A. Moran has described this as a "fiasco" and said "[Ewan Birney] has almost single-handedly* damaged the reputation of 400 scientists in the ENCODE Consortium and he did it, in part, because he was not knowledgeable about his own field of expertise!"[2].
Minnesota Biology associate-prof PZ Myers said "I don’t think Birney has a clue about the biology.[...] If one of Birney’s goals was to make ENCODE “comprehensible to the general public”, I can’t imagine a better example of a colossal catastrophe. Not only does the public and media fail to understand what ENCODE was about, but they’ve instead grasped only the completely erroneous misinterpretation that Birney put front and center in his summary.[...] The creationists are overjoyed, and regard Birney’s bogus claims about the data as a vindication"[3]
Guelph biologist T. Ryan Gregory endorsed the comment "Birney: “For me, the driving concern was to avoid over-hyping the medical applications…” Really? You mean like when you helped Nature produce a video cartoon in which ENCODE is presented as a mega-robot that destroys cancer and heart disease by punching it very hard? [....]"[4]
Nature quoted Moran's criticism[5], Scientific American published an article titled "Junk DNA, Junky PR"[6], North County Times reported on "Birney’s semantic switch"[7], Huffingtonpost published "ENCODE [..measured..] biochemical landmarks[..which..] do not by themselves demonstrate that a region of the genome is doing something useful for us. This distinction was obscured by the press releases put out by ENCODE, and largely lost on most of the reporters who covered the story. [..] The widely reported claim of debunked junk DNA is simply wrong."[8], HHMI Group Leader Sean Eddy said "ENCODE calls a piece of DNA “functional” if it reproducibly binds to a DNA-binding protein, is reproducibly marked by a specific chromatin modification, or if it is transcribed. OK. That’s a fine, measurable operational definition. (One might wonder, why not just call “DNA replication” a function too, and define 100% of the genome as biochemically functional, but of course, as Ewan Birney (the ENCODE czar) would tell you, I would never be that petty. No sir.) [..] But as far as questions of “junk DNA” are concerned, ENCODE’s definition isn’t relevant at all. The “junk DNA” question is about how much DNA has essentially no direct impact on the organism’s phenotype – roughly, what DNA could I remove (if I had the technology) and still get the same organism. [...] if you made a piece of junk for yourself — a completely random DNA sequence! — [..] ENCODE would call the RNA transcript of your random DNA junk “functional”, by their technical definition."[9], etc..

This situation is widely reported in mainstream media (therefore notable), and we have easy access to numerous authorative sources, so it seems worth mentioning in the article. Cesiumfrog (talk) 00:20, 27 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ewan's biography

The summary of Ewan's biography as corrected in April 2013 to reflect his change of position at EMBL-EBI. This was done alongside updates to the EMBL-EBI website, which were checked for accuracy by a number of people at EMBL-EBI. Further details are associated with the changes themselves Themarytodd (talk) 11:27, 23 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Ewan Birney. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:14, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]