Dear all, next week, the SIB will host Keith Baggerly from the MD Anderson Cancer Center (USA), who will speak about "When is Reproducibility an Ethical Issue? Genomics, Personalized Medicine, and Human Error" The presentation will take place on *Tuesday 12 November October 2013 at 14h00* in the Auditoire B of the Génopode building (Dorigny campus of the University of Lausanne). While this presentation does not happen at the usual time for our "statistics forum", it is likely to be of interest to most statisticians around. Keith's name is associated with the terms "forensic bioinformatics" and "reproducible research", and he was one of the main actors in the "great Duke cancer disaster" saga (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/health/research/08genes.html?_r=1& for more information). If you are looking for a more scientific reading, his paper published in the "Annals of Applied Statistics" (http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aoas/1267453942) is particularly interesting. The abstract follows: Modern high-throughput biological assays let us ask detailed questions about how diseases operate, and promise to let us personalize therapy. Careful data processing is essential, because our intuition about what the answers “should” look like is very poor when we have to juggle thousands of things at once. When documentation of such processing is absent, we must apply “forensic bioinformatics” to work from the raw data and reported results to infer what the methods must have been. We will present several case studies where simple errors may have put patients at risk. This work has been covered both in the scientific press and on the front page of the New York Times, and has prompted several journals to revisit the types of information that must accompany publications. We discuss steps we take to avoid such errors, and lessons that can be applied to large data sets more broadly. Hope to see you there! Frédéric -- Frédéric Schütz, PhD Frederic.Schutz@isb-sib.ch Bioinformatics Core Facility (Delorenzi group) Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics http://www.isb-sib.ch/ University of Lausanne http://www.unil.ch/ Batiment Genopode Quartier Sorge Phone: +41 21 692 40 94 CH-1015 Lausanne Fax: +41 21 692 40 65