I am going to buck the current trend of blogging about the Nobel prizes, mostly because they will receive plenty of comments without my input, and partly because I am preoccupied with other things. The French will be very happy with Barré-Sinoussi’s and Montagnier’s win, even half of a prize.

Thursday was spent in a day-long meeting, after a short night, with an English group that recovers dead human embryos for research purposes, and their Scientific Advisory Committee from all over Europe. This group is somewhat more high-throughput than we are in providing a community service, but over the last year we have all come to realize that they and we have converged on a series of best practices and have had to grapple with the same potential ethical objections. The meeting was to discuss new technical possibilities (cell line derivation, whole genome sequencing) and, above all, to determine next steps forward.

We had painfully constructed a large consortium involving many different groups in addition to our two, with interest in not only acquiring and redistributing these biological resources in an ethical manner, but also a number of computer scientists who want to make raw but also processed (mostly image) data available in different manners. The subtext of the computer scientists’ participation was that they believe they will be able to, without prejudice, perform data mining that will bring out fundamental truths that “the biologists” would never have found on their own. Admittedly, not in that manner, but as one of the biologists in question, I do get a little impatient with the attitude that number- or pixel-crunching will be enough in and of itself. We need one another, and biologists are not just data generators, nor are computer scientists just data crunchers.

Anyhow, we were too many groups and too prospective to be funded as an infrastructure this round, and this summer, we scored 12.5 out of 15 possible points and the cut-off for negotiation of funds is 13. The criticisms had little to do with the “wet” biology and mostly to do with demonstrating community interest and the management issues of such an unwieldy consortium with so many interests. So Thursday was to pare it down, report on the English group’s results from previous funding for a European Design Study, and introduce some members of the streamlined coalescing group to one another.

I therefore had the pleasure of meeting in person a representative of the Danish Wilhelm Johannsen Centre for Functional Genome Research . We had been discussing since this spring how we could firm up the proof that we already do work together, by publishing experiments in which more than one research group would feature among the authors. One approach is to send them material to be sequenced on their next-gen Illumina sequencer. (I had thought we would use a local access to one of these platforms in Toulouse, but the analytical software is somewhat more user-friendly for the moment on the Illumina platform, for our purposes). This material is leftover from an experiment my Ph.D. student (to her credit) thought of and carried out, to demonstrate that a particular stretch of DNA is the target of a transcription factor in the developing heart.

To get to that point, she had performed the experiment first with a whole but mangled embryo that we had set aside for such trials, and then with dissected limb buds. In the latter case, the same transcription factor appears to target other bits of DNA, which fit well with her hypothesis. So far so good.

After the meeting, I brought my Danish colleague up to meet my lab. I moderated a discussion between my student and this colleague, about how and what to send her for sequencing. Then, when said colleague had left, my student said, “Oh, by the way…”.

She asked me how much it would cost to purchase the kits for our colleague and work with her. Then she mentioned in an artificially off-hand manner that she had already contacted Fasteris , a company apparently recommended by Illumina, for subcontracting the sequencing. As of September 5th, although I was last in lab in Paris from September 11th to 13th, and she never mentioned it. That she had already sent them the whole-embryo DNA bits, that she had paid for it from our common pool of funding for the research team, and that they had sent back some initial validation that she had indeed provided them with human DNA before going ahead with the full quote.

So, I managed to catch the ball on the rebound, and we will send the limb bud DNA to our Danish colleagues for future exploitation, and probably still go ahead and send the precious heart material to Switzerland. However, I would have liked to have the choice as to which strategic sample to send to the company, or how to spend money that I have helped bring in to the lab funding pool. I would have liked the whole research group to discuss this initiative and to be aware of it, before she launched her boat. Most of all, I resent the underhandedness of trying to force me to accept a fait accompli, and I wish I could understand the reasons behind it.

The senior member of my group who went ahead and signed the purchase order did not seem particularly sympathetic and pooh-poohed my expressed irritation Friday evening. Is this a power struggle of some sort? I wrote the company today and asked to be put in cc: on any further correspondence. Need earnestness always cede to cynicism?