PD: Day 100 - Wow, already one hundred days

So I have been doing the postdoc diary for a hundred days now. So what have we learned, one I like lists (either making them or working off of them), two my wife can cook and three it is sometimes very difficult to get things published in the biomedical field. This is because most journals are in search of novel results and not necessarily into results that are confirmatory or negate previous findings. At least that is my opinion.

The other thing is that currently genetics is married to association studies even though they often lack replicable results or too not meet statistical significance under multiple testing - this in turn leads to false discoveries that are unable to be confirmed. Another thing that is ignored - often by most journals and genetic associations are health disparity populations. Let's take Type II Diabetes for example, according to the CDC, this disease impacts 8.7% of the European population, whereas it impacts 18% of the American Indians, 13.3% of African Americans, and 14% of Hispanics over 20 years of age. Now the problem is most of the association studies done to date, have only been done on European populations and the associations are not replicable in these other health disparity groups. A problem that is often ignored or not reported in these studies is populations stratification, meaning that different groups have had different histories and therefore the underlying population structure as well genes impacting complex disorders are going to be different. This is not rocket science but common sense, that is often ignored. Oh well, onward and upward.

Worked on a few things today, getting some data, and then running the script (see yesterday's list) which took a little longer than I thought it would. But I did get it to work and it ran swimmingly. Then home to eat and sleep.