Wheat rusts never sleep but neither do sequencers: will pathogenomics transform the way plant diseases are managed?

It Ain’t What You Do (But the Way That You Do It): Will Safety II Transform the Way We Do Patient Safety; Comment on “False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice”

Mannion and Braithwaite outline a new paradigm for studying and improving patient safety – Safety II. In this response, I argue that Safety I should not be dismissed simply because the safety management strategies that are developed and enacted in the name of Safety I are not always true to the original philosophy of ‘systems thinking.’

'Media will never influence learning': but will simulation?

In this edition of Medical Education, Norman, Dore and Grierson present a review of the association between simulation fidelity and transfer of learning. The review addresses a practical question, references literature from several disciplines, and tackles important limitations in a manner that can enlighten medical educators. In this commentary, we expand upon some of the theories cited with t...

Will Benchtop Sequencers Resolve the Sequencing Trade-off in Plant Genetics?

An important experimental design consideration in plant genetics is the trade-off between number of individuals and number of loci that can be genotyped (Davey et al., 2011). For any given study, an investigator must choose how they partition research effort and resources, with the generation of many loci usually coming at the expense of many individuals, and vice versa. For example, for parent...

There's a will but is there a way?

Life Will Never Be the Same

It seems appropriate that the Cold Spring Harbor Genome Sequencing and Biology Meeting, which witnessed the creation of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in 1988, should this year present three major advances in genomic science: the completion of the ®nished sequence of Drosophila melanogaster; the announcement that 85% of the genome of Homo sapiens is now in draft sequence; and the complete...