The Battle over the Soul of Law Professor Blogs

Unbeknownst to most of us outside the legal academy, there apparently is some disagreement over whether blogs that law professors operate should be regarded as legitimate scholarship and public service, or should be dismissed as a frivolous waste of time that detracts from the more traditional scholarly pursuits of writing massive law review articles and pontificating to the mainstream media on legal issues of public interest. As so often is the case, the answer to this conundrum is “It depends.” A law professor’s blog post or series of blog posts certainly can constitute scholarship or public service. But, merely because a blog post is written by a law professor does not guarantee that what results ought to be regarded as scholarship or public service, nor does every law professor blogger intend for every post, or even a majority of their posts, to constitute either scholarship or public service

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead