Here’s a new source of Harvard gossip. 02139 is a magazine all about Harvard, targeted at Harvard alumni (02138 is of course the school’s zipcode in Cambridge). The latest issue has an excerpt from James Watson’s upcoming memoir, aptly titled: Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.

In this bit from the book, Watson attacks Harvard (Cambridge-side, that is) for being complacent and not funding basic biology research enough; the result, he says, is that it’s falling behind MIT/Whitehead. He also criticizes Harvard’s plans to expand science in Allston. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt.

Past stinginess of Harvard deans had played a big role in the problem that indiscriminate lavishness could not now fix. For far too long, University Hall had witlessly acted as if Harvard did not have to spend its own money to keep a place in the top league of science. The leadership assumed that Harvard’s golden name would naturally move the federal government to fund not only its research but also the creation of new facilities. But brand names count for very little in science. And so, foolishly, Harvard sat on its heels for about two decades while MIT smoothly integrated the privately funded Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research into its biology operations, and under the never-shy Eric Lander, the renowned biologist, created a huge DNA sequencing facility. Thus MIT became a major player in the Human Genome Project, the intellectual driveshaft for much of today’s most exciting biology and medicine.
Only belatedly did Harvard try to enter the Genome Age by committing itself, as the 21st century began, to becoming strong in systems biology, a discipline so sprawling and unwieldy as to merit comparison to Enron in its limitless expansions before the collapse into nothingness…

…Harvard salaries must once again be much higher than those of serious competitors. To get stars, you need to offer star salaries. The best of academia no longer will come to Harvard because it is Harvard. No one goes into scientific research to get rich, but nor does one undertake it to evade the comforts of life. Living close enough to Harvard Yard to enjoy its ambiance and diversions is now beyond the means of new Harvard appointees with families unless the faculty salary is matched by another of the same magnitude. Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth—provided that the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allston expansion, at present envisioned to cover the area of 25 football fields, is abandoned. The creation or restoration of a great scientific institution is not a matter of real estate development. Science that leads over the horizon depends before anything else on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the times. Such minds inevitably draw their like, and the rest takes care of itself.

The Globe’s science section today has a rare feature story on same pretty basic biology: genomics and what’s going on in all that noncoding DNA. As a science journalist worried about the decrease in hard science coverage in this country’s financially stressed daily newspapers (not that I’m knocking health/medical stories), I’m glad to see that the Globe was able to make space for such a long piece that delves a little bit into some hard-core molecular biology (for a newspaper, that is): how genes work, what RNA does in the cell, what newly discovered roles RNA might be playing, etc. It also makes an effort to quote more than the usual stable of quotable scientists (move over Lander!). You may criticize the article for its not-so-deep treatment of the science, but at least they covered it, which is a lot for a newspaper that’s not the NY Times.

Along with that feature was also a story about the Personal Genome Project, the brainchild of Harvard geneticist George Church. In the project, 10 volunteers, including Church, are getting their genomes sequenced and this fall, that data, along with their medical histories, will be publicly released. The piece discusses some of the privacy issues involved in having your own genome sequence data available. The article also identifies the 9 out of 10 people, including Church himself, who have given permission to be named as volunteers in the project.

Former MIT Media Lab director, Nicholas Negroponte, is passionate about his $100 laptop as a way of bringing low-cost technology to children of the developing world and bridging the digital divide (it’s actually $188). But it hasn’t been selling as well as he had hoped, according to the Globe, so he’s looking to sell it to ordinary consumers, hoping that they’ll buy two for $399 and donate one to a child in a developing country. I had a chance to check out one of the computers at SciFoo. It was small, light and cute. Practical? We’ll see.