Stop Using the Term "Noncoding DNA:" It Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

Axel Visel is a member of the ENCODE Consortium. He is a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California (USA). Axel Visel is responsible, in part, for the publicity fiasco of September 2012 where the entire ENCODE Consortium gave the impression that most of our genome is functional.

He is also the senior author on a paper I blogged about last week—the one where some journalists made a big deal about junk DNA when there was nothing in the paper about junk DNA [How to Turn a Simple Paper into a Scientific Breakthrough: Mention Junk DNA].

Dan Graur contacted him by email to see if he had any comment about this misrepresentation of his published work and he defended the journalist. Here's the email response from Axel Visel to Dan Gaur.
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