[Statlist] Presentation: "When is Reproducibility an Ethical Issue? Genomics, Personalized, Medicine, and Human Error", Keith Baggerly on 12 November 2013

[Frédéric Schütz]

Dear all,

Tuesday 12 November, the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in
Lausanne will host Keith Baggerly from the MD Anderson Cancer Center
(USA) who will speak about

  "When is Reproducibility an Ethical Issue? Genomics, Personalized
   Medicine, and Human Error"

The presentation will take place on *Tuesday 12 November October 2013 at
14h00* in the Auditoire B of the Génopode building (Dorigny campus of
the University of Lausanne).

Keith's name is associated with the terms "forensic bioinformatics" and
"reproducible research", and he was one of the main actors in the "great
Duke cancer disaster" saga (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/health/research/08genes.html?_r=1& for
more information). If you are looking for a more scientific reading, his
paper published in the "Annals of Applied Statistics"
(http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aoas/1267453942)
is particularly interesting.

Abstract:

Modern high-throughput biological assays let us ask detailed
questions about how diseases operate, and promise to let us personalize
therapy. Careful data processing is essential, because our intuition
about what the answers “should” look like is very poor when we have to
juggle thousands of things at once. When documentation of such
processing is absent, we must apply “forensic bioinformatics” to work
from the raw data and reported results to infer what the methods must
have been. We will present several case studies where simple errors may
have put patients at risk. This work has been covered both in the
scientific press and on the front page of the New York Times, and has
prompted several journals to revisit the types of information that must
accompany publications. We discuss steps we take to avoid such errors,
and lessons that can be applied to large data sets more broadly.

Hope to see you there!

Frédéric
-- 
Frédéric Schütz, PhD                  Frederic.Schutz at isb-sib.ch
Bioinformatics Core Facility (Delorenzi group)
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics     http://www.isb-sib.ch/
University of Lausanne                http://www.unil.ch/
Batiment Genopode
Quartier Sorge                        Phone: +41 21 692 40 94
CH-1015 Lausanne                      Fax:   +41 21 692 40 65