Reminds me of' Sable / Famine's pre-apocalyptic fast food business in 'Good Omens':

"Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW(TM). CHOW(TM) contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman...MEALS(TM) was Sable's latest brainwave. MEALS(TM) was CHOW(TM) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS(TM) you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition. The paradox delighted Sable."

Moving the window buttons to the left is 'innovation'?

Though 'nobody expected anything remotely like the epoch shifting device' is over the top, the main point is hardly complete nonsense. Most of the speculation was indeed heavily influenced by the iPod and older style smartphones:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Apple was seriously considering a clickwheel-based design 15 months before the iPhone was unveiled:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2...

Here you go:

http://mate-desktop.org/donate...

"James Anderson, director of the NIHâ(TM)s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which administered the CRM, counters that only one application - that made by Kapil Bharti of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda and his colleagues - received a high enough score from an external review board to justify continued funding."

You can take this at face value, or assume academic politics, but it doesn't seem like party politics.

"I took a speed reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It's about Russia."

6) Did you notice the :-) ?

You're only as good as your last RAE :-)

http://physicsworld.com/cws/ar...

"An unofficial Physics World ranking that lists departments according to their average research score shows Lancaster on top and Cambridge close behind. Both departments also received the maximum 5* rating in the last RAE in 2001, but the other 5* departments - Oxford, Southampton and Imperial College London - fell outside the top 10 this time round. "

People (and genetic risks) are different. One person's 'making the most of my time left' is another's 'spending decades with the constant threat of a terrible disease blighting my life'. In Jim Watson's case, he was already at an age where presumably he'd made adequate provision for his loved ones (the link is with late, rather than early onset dementia). Knowing that he might be at increased (but very far from absolute) risk of losing his mental faculties late in life wasn't useful information to him, but might have led him to worry about something he could do nothing about. It's not hard to think of other scenarios where an individual may make the (perfectly valid) choice to not know everything about his genome.

What if there is no effective treatment? James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA structure and one of the first people to have his entire genome sequenced, chose not to know the sequence of his APOE gene, some variants of which have been linked to an increased risk of late onset Alzheimer's disease.

90% of murderers, and 99% of convicted rapists, have a copy of the SRY gene, which is much higher than its frequency in the general population (about 50%). SRY has been linked with aggressive behaviour, autism, and a preference for large, fast cars.

There's a better article on the UK Channel 4 site (C4 will broadcast the documentary):

http://www.channel4.com/info/p...

They claim to be a "non-for-profit research and development organization". They have a respectable list of publications, all the way up to co-authorship in a Nature paper, so doesn't look like a scam!:

http://bioinfo.pl/papers.html

Interesting that the main investor in this operation (and apparently the chip design) seems to be an academic bioinformatics institute in Poland: http://bioinfo.pl/

I guess it beats applying for research grants...

No, the results are not disproven and certainly not shown to be fabricated, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise after the feeding frenzy about this paper on the internet. There are certainly grounds for scepticism, though. We'll have to wait until this has been thoroughly tested using the more detailed protocols that have now been made available before we can call it one way or the other.