April 9, 2014 – The Great Old Blog

How do you imagine the future of data sharing in healthcare or research? This post was written by Clara Podmore as one of the honorable mentions for our data sharing essay competitions. Since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Watson and Crick, research in the field of human genetics has progressed at an incredible pace and is now clearly impacting the way medicine is being practiced and taught. The vision is that better understanding of genetics will not only allow identification of individuals at risk of developing a given disease and hence enable prevention, but that it will also allow personalisation of medical care to patients. For example, treatments will be prescribed more appropriately to patients based on their genetic information, hence improving drug response while decreasing the number or risk of side effects of medication, such as potentially fatal drug reactions. In addition, the identification of mutations, which are faults in DNA which may lead to disease, will provide a better understanding of the disease process and hence provide new targets for drug development. In this present time, when obtaining a DNA sample is a fairly non-invasive procedure and can be done simply by taking […]

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Honourable Mention: Andrew Magee

April 9, 2014September 18, 2019

The Makings of a Meta-Analysis or: How I Wasted Dozens of Hours Obtaining Publicly Available Data This post was written by Andrew Magee as one of the honorable mentions for our data sharing essay competitions. Phylogenies are estimates of the genealogical relationships among species, and are increasingly critical to research in a vast and rapidly expanding number of scientific disciplines, including evolutionary and conservation biology, comparative genomics, medicine and epidemiology. The process of estimating phylogenies from genetic sequence data is technically demanding and computationally intensive: many modern estimation techniques rely on Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which can require a great deal of expertise to apply and hundreds or thousands of CPU hours to perform. Given their incredible utility and the effort required to estimate them, it is crucial that phylogenetic data are readily available to the scientific community. There have been numerous initiatives to promote the permanence of and increase access to phylogenetic data, among these are strict journal and publisher policies and even a government mandate for publicly funded projects. Stated reasons for such policies are variable, but reproducibility and accountability, foundational ideas of science, are common. Still, despite policies mandating data sharing, and a clear […]