"As a side note, I talked to a colleague who got harassed at the Ichs and Herps meeting for... gasp... downloading sequences from GenBank and using them without asking the author's permission! Good lord, what is the world coming to? I'm surprised to hear of such active resistance to public availability of information." - pn

You're kidding me? When and where did the term Public Domain get so badly mauled - Deepak Singh

The post has nothing to do with the paragraph above, but this shows the level of scientific "vision" of some groups that are mostly devoted to basic science, like Herpetology and Ichthyology. Some years ago, maybe 6, 7, I was harassed by colleagues because I was using ClustalW to align my sequences. Not because some other better program was available, but because Clustal generates a Neighbour Joining tree to guide the alignment. Apparently this NJ tree was destroying the parsimony of the sequence evolution. - pn

I will bump this entry tomorrow morning (EST) ... - pn

You should. It's a good post in itself, with a footnote to make you shake your head - Deepak Singh

bumped ...! - pn