This is just my naive opinion as a biologist rather than say, an aeronautical engineer, but it would seem to me that the role of government is to sponsor and conduct high-risk, high-reward research that has little or no probability of foreseeable commercial payoff while the role of corporations is to sponsor and conduct research that has been sufficient well-established in such a way so as to commercialize it for the general public and to reduce its cost to a minimum? (And yes, I consider space exploration to be a form of research.) We've been doing loops around the Earth for about five decades now, so don't you think that low Earth orbit is sufficiently well understood for it to be outsourced to the private sector, while NASA focuses on loftier goals?

I realize I may be drastically oversimplifying the issue, but it seems to me that NASA is on the right track. Wouldn't American space exploration stagnate if we continue to fixate on the space shuttle (whose success has not been entirely unequivocal, imho)? Just my two cents.

First off, the fact that we are continuing to resequence individual human genomes through projects like the 1000 Genomes Project (and attempting to do de novo assemblies, so we're not just relying on the HGP reference genome) as well as articles telling out about such incidences makes it in my view unlikely that significant contamination will continue as research continues.

Putting that aside, I fail to see how how the usage of invalid DNA sequences in biomedical research, leading to problems with disease treatment as you've mentioned, will lead to selection of those genes in vivo in Mycoplasma. Sure, those efforts to research those diseases will be set back, but how will that confer selective advantage to Mycoplasma carrying genes containing those sequences unless Mycoplasma is directly involved (or affected) by treating the disease in humans (which will definitely not be true in general)? That's the missing biological link. There has to be a mechanism by which direct benefit is conferred onto Mycoplasma as a downstream consequence of those contaminants being in our databases, but unless the invalid sequences are in genes that are involved in some Mycoplasma infection, Mycoplasma doesn't stand to gain anything at all.

IAABIT [I am a biologist in training] and I personally work in genomics, so from my experience my guess of what likely got these sequences into the databases in the first place is a combination of their similarity to actual human sequence (despite the absence of homology), favorable sequence bias during the library generating process (the effects will be determined by what protocols you use), and possibly prevalence in the standard lab environment. None of these features are likely to confer evolutionary benefit to Mycoplasma "in the wild" under normal circumstances (i.e. the invalid sequences don't belong to genes involved in Mycoplasma infection), so I honestly don't see where this notion of the "arms race" is coming from.

I don't want to be excessively harsh but the summary was seriously a bunch of drivel. In silico either means it's data on the computer, or that you are simulating a biological process computationally. But as other posters have mentioned, unless you are purposely simulating evolution, mycoplasma sequences in your human databases isn't going to cause any "arms race." Yes, it seriously screws with validity, but that's a completely different issue.

This is a generalization, and no offense to fellow Slashdotters, but in my experience most of the computer scientists that I've met have a really crappy understanding of even basic biology. CS concepts don't directly translate to biology ones.

I agree that we should have a perspective of erudition as opposed to apathy. However, I think your reduction of causes might have been too general here. Those three causes, as you said, are the cause of any error. However, when we deal with car accidents we are dealing with human nature (most humans are quite ... lazy ... and will not take the time to clearly apply information towards future "goals" of driving safely) as well as a few millennia of culture. You have a significantly more complex issue at hand when dealing with mistakes such as these and to rectify them would take significantly less effort than to persuade people on a single issue of Iraqi War (or, if you have sufficiently political influence, directly influence the Bush administration). That is not to say we should attempt to rectify both problems; some problems take longer than others and perhaps it is a good idea to go "one step at a time." What do you think?