just had to comment on an article from the 2009 Hindustan Times with an interesting story: an Indian expat wants to reestablish himself in his birth country. First thing he does, he writes a report and tries to capitalize all science assets he finds---without syncing with any political peers. Consequently, he is frowned upon and loses his job. Last I saw was his blog spewing one-sided information at his previous employer-to-be. Now, what does this tell the reader? First, before returning "home", check political compatibility; if not matching, first find peers with power before embarking on touchy subjects. It also proves having a standard scientific education does not create political sensibility in a person.

600 papers, 3700 annotations on 1600 genes!

reaction

not totally unexpectedly, something has boiled over, and in Nature as that, no less. This online article gives some people voice who were not amused by some too early announcements (we wrote about that too). And no wonder the publishing houses grab any opportunity to discredit efforts that might make them obsolete if succesful. On the other hand, it could be an opportunity to win more moral ground by pointing at those that didn't participate. So, let's look at the interesting bits.

Nature writes Brahmachari's highly publicized announcement on 11 April that the project has comprehensively mapped, compiled and verified the genome of M.tb. but they don't give any reference to Brahmachari's alleged announcement. They would be hard pressed. It was all Indian mass media quoting Brahmachari and I give him the benefit of the doubt that he was misquoted. I mean, not even the author of the Nature comment appears to have a grasp about what the first phase of TBGO was about.

As we read on, however, clouds accumulate. Brahmachari was misquoted another time? It depends on how succesful Raghava was with his neural nets. Probably he had some result, and that was overhyped by Brahmachari. I can now see that.

Next, a description of the TBGO sub project contains a link to some completely different thing on TBrowse, and Jayaraman doesn't notice it. Talk about quality paper. But Gohkale, the CSIR director, has no clue either. He apparently wasn't told that "the data" is still not available, the effort of the few dozen remaining participants is stalling, and no one does any real work except that bloody fool from Berlin who single-handedly annotates all 7-800 papers on the subject, and doesn't see a single rupee of the cake!

The rest of the article is opinions.

In my opinion, the real issue is not that some unlucky people frantically try to make the best of a seemingly hopeless situation (you mean bloody students?) and a whopping $32 million. I would never stay in the path of people with such visions. I would rather finish annotating (July), then write my part of the paper, and quietly switch to pathway work at reactome.org. I can guess, however, that there will be more on the subject, if not from the frightened houses.