Taking the Link Out of Dr. Sharon's Blog

Yesterday Dr. Sharon (Sharon Moalem) posted a silly article about junk DNA [Please Take the Junk Out of DNA]. I've already quoted the silly parts and took note of the fact that I had made a comment on his website. That comment never appeared; instead there's now a single comment that happens to be favorable.

In his original posting Sharon Moalem said,

The idea of junk came out of the central dogma (this is not some Politburo manifesto) because some people erroneously believed that if DNA wasn’t used to make a functional protein than it must be like Grandma’s plastic covered couch, junk.

The words "central dogma" (above) liked to my article [The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology]. In that article, I give the correct version of the Central Dogma,

... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again.
                                                                         (F.H.C. Crick, 1958)

Anyone with a brain can see that Sharon Moalem's statement looks very, very silly once you realize what the Central Dogma really means.

What would you do if you were "Dr. Sharon"? I'll tell you what I would do. I would read the comment I left on his blog then re-read the article on the Central Dogma. I would recognize that I made a mistake and modify my article accordingly. Perhaps I would remove the sentence implying that the concept of "junk" came out of the central dogma. That's what I would do. That's what any rational person would do.

What did "Dr. Sharon" do? He removed the link to my article on the Central Dogma.

Oh dear. That looks bad, doesn't it?

UPDATE: (Sept. 2012) Now his entire post has disappeared.

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