My brothers dream come true: baseball meets bioinformatics

James Fraser & Michael Eisen: Baseball Meets Biology

 

Boston, Bioinformatics & Ben Franklin Award wrap up from #BioIT11

Photo by Mark Gabrenya

Well, just got back from Boston where I went to the BioIT World convention to pick up the "Benjamin Franklin Award" for contributions to Open Science from Bioinformatics.Org.  A quick round up of the trip:

Michael Eisen gives the bird to the Redsox and A's

Yup, that is my brother, Michael Eisen, on his birthday yesterday, giving the bird to the As and Redsox. RIP Mark Fidrych.

Evidence Based Healthcare and Baseball

Love the Op Ed piece in the Friday New York Times entitled "How to take American Healthcare from Worst to First."  First, one reason I love this article is it is discussing how we need to move to more "Evidence Based" medicine.  You may be amazed to know that much of medicine is not evidence based but that is the sad truth.  When I first heard about how not all medicine was evidence based medicine (in a talk by David Cox when I was a grad. student) I was blown away.  Anyway, the article is worth a read from this point of view.  

More amazingly is the author list -- Billy Beane (general manager of the Oakland A's), Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry.  What a combination.  They make the argument that medicine needs a wholesale change in the way it is done just like baseball is shifting to more evidence based decisions.  It is a nice analogy.  Too bad the current administration believes that simply thinking about something is the equivalent to evidence.  And also too bad that McCain-Palin seem to be following in the trend of Bush to not hold "evidence" in high regard.  I wonder what Newt (who is a big science and technology advocate) thinks of the recent anti-science push of the Republicans in power.

BBB - Baseball, bioinformatics, and brothers

I know quite a few people in bioinformatics who are also pretty avid baseball fans. Ian Paulsen and I sneaked away from a conference to go see his beloved Padres last year get slaughtered in two playoff games. A resercher from Wash. U.'s Genome Center caught Mcgiure's 70th home run a few years ago. An article in Bioinformatics even promotes a software package as being useful for viewing baseball stats.

I have tried to convince people there are connections between the two in the past. But the best article I have seen on this is, for better or worse, about my brother. What a scam he has pulled at Berkeley. He is teaching a course (with James Fraser) ostensibly about bioinformatics in some way. What is is really about? Baseball statistics. They are not even trying to pretend it is about bioinformatics. But they apparently hope that some of the stats rubs off enough that some students get into bioinformatics.

As an ex-baseball player I have some smpathy for their approach. Also, it was at a baseball game that my brother first convinced me that Open Access science was the way to go. But I think focusing on stats is the wrong way to use an interest in baseball to get an interest in biology. I think it would be better to get Drew Endy and his cohort into using one of their synthetic biology competitions to make some good new steroids. And then the stats course could be used to analyze the differences with and without the new drugs.