Here's a quotation from an opinion piece published last spring.
Borger, P. and Schmidtgall, B. (2020) Free Science from Dogma. or: How the “Pseudogene” Hampered Scientific Progress. American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research: MS.ID.001239. doi: 10.34297/AJBSR.2020.08.001239]The report of my death
Mark Twain
was an exaggeration.
(Samuel Clemens)
June 2, 1897After publication of the groundbreaking results of the ENCODE project, which showed that the genome is largely functional, scientists now prefer to speak of non-coding DNA instead of Junk Dna. Incidentally, this new term is still misleading, as this DNA does contain functional genetic code. It usually codes for RNA molecules, which function as background operational programs that command and co-ordinate activation/deactivation of genes. It is needed for processes in the cell to run smoothly. The term junk DNA is now known as one of the greatest failures of life sciences. The term has left the science stage silently.
The focus of the article is on the imminent death of the term "pseudogene" because, in the opinon of the authors, pseudogenes have a function. The reason I'm quoting the section on junk DNA is because I'm struggling to understand how such a distorted view of genomes has become so widespread. We can attribute some of it to the massive publicity campaign launched in 2012 by the ENCODE Consortium with the active help of Nature and Science but that was eight years ago and there has been lots of criticism of ENCODE since then. Surely, we can expect that anyone who feels qualified to publish an opinon of junk DNA has kept up with the literature. Why haven't they?
The irony lies in the title of the opinon piece. We all want to free science from dogma but the tricky part is not in identifying dogmatic views in others but in recognizing them in ourselves. I've found that the best way to do that is to discuss my ideas with lots of smart people; they're not shy about correcting me when I'm wrong. This kind of debate, which is related to peer review, is supposed to be the very essence of science but it's clearly not working.
