Next week, the SIB will host Keith Baggerly, who will do a
presentation on Tue 12 November at 14:00 on “When is Reproducibility an
Ethical Issue? Genomics, Personalized Medicine, and Human Error”.

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).

—
When is Reproducibility an Ethical Issue? Genomics, Personalized
Medicine, and Human Error

Keith Baggerly
MD Anderson Cancer Center

Tuesday 12 November 2013, 14:00
Génopode building (UNIL), auditoire B

Brief Abstract:

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.