The futur of biotech patents – part 1

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[En français]

What is the futur (if any) of biotech patents? What did the Bilski ruling change? Did it change something at all? I’m not a specialist, but I’ll give it a try. First, this posting will adress the question about the definition of what patenting the living means. In another one, I’ll try to go more into some historical details and their importance for the futur of biotech patents.

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EMBO meeting special session: The intelligent brain – does sexe matter?

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This is a summary of the talk Prof. Richard Haier gave on September 6 titled The new science of intelligence: men, women and brains. There are various things I do not agree with. However, I will not comment on them in this posting to let everybody read what Prof. Haier said and not what I think about what he said.

Contrary to myth, intelligence can be defined and measured. Intelligence tests scores are related to brain features. Genetic and epigenetic influence on intelligence can be assessed: intelligence is thus 100% biological. The talk was organized as follows:

  1. Examples of people with extraordinary intelligence;
  2. Measuring intelligence;
  3. Brain localisation of intelligence;
  4. Gender-specific intelligence.
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Exclusive: opening of the EMBO meeting in Barcelona, Spain

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I haven’t said it yet, but I’m at the EMBO meeting in Barcelona (Spain) at the moment. I’ll attend some exciting workshops and lectures, but – last but not least – I’ll present a poster at the session dedicated to Genomics and Computational Biology on Tuesday. The satellite session is finished now and the opening talks and lectures took place after 6 pm in the Auditorium of the Palau des Congressos. Some impressions below 🙂

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Bookmark: BioMed Central launches a new initiative to promote data sharing

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Open AccessBMC Researcher Notes’ latest editorial titles A call for BMC Research Notes contributions promoting best practice in data standardization, sharing and publication. It announces a new initiative aiming at promoting best practice in sharing and publishing data, with a focus on standardized, re-useable formats. Thus, data from original research project described by precised Data Notes will be made publicly accessible and, along with, an example dataset will be included.

This great initiative is a new step towards open data and research reproducibility!

Read the original announcement from BMC.

Bookmark: The third reviewer

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Il s’agit d’un forum pour scientifiques où ils peuvent commenter des papiers récemment publiés. Un peu comme un Journal club. Pour l’instant, le thème ayant le plus d’articles est Neurosciences, mais la Microbiologie commence à arriver aussi.
Le (très) mauvais point : les articles non open access ne présentent que les abstracts (résumés). Donc, si on n’a pas accès au journal, c’est loupé pour lire le tout.

À voir ici.