Seven years of the MicroBinfie podcast
by Nabil-Fareed Alikhan, Lee Katz and Andrew J. Page
There is no manual. The largest Listeria cluster anyone had ever seen turned out to be the blood agar. German police spent sixteen years hunting a woman whose DNA was at murder scene after murder scene; she worked in the factory that made the swabs. Neither was a sequencing failure.
Almost nothing you need to know to do this work is written down. You learn that a file of nothing but capital letters in the quality string is old data lying to you, and you learn it because somebody mentions it in a corridor — not because you read it anywhere. The trouble is that most bioinformaticians don’t have a corridor.
For seven years, three of them ran a podcast about it instead. This book is a hundred and fifty-six episodes of MicroBinfie rearranged into something you can read: the file formats nobody designed, the contamination that looked like a discovery, the assembler that stops exactly where the interesting thing is, why nobody can agree what a species is, and a national pandemic response stood up in a fortnight on five years of groundwork nobody had noticed at the time.
It is also a record of being wrong in public. Where somebody said a thing on air that the following years demolished, the wrong version is still there and the correction follows it.
Read it free
| Format | Best for | Size |
|---|---|---|
| EPUB | E-readers, phones and tablets; Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and Kindle via Send to Kindle | 333 KB |
| PDF, paperback layout | Reading on screen exactly as printed (6 × 9 in, 188 pages) | 980 KB |
| PDF, A4 | Printing at home, or annotating | 960 KB |
| PDF, phone | A narrow page sized for a phone screen | 1.1 MB |
| PDF, large print | 17-point type for easier reading | 1.1 MB |
| Web page | Reading in a browser, one long page | 530 KB |
| Plain text | Anything at all; screen readers, slow connections | 500 KB |
Buy the paperback
The paperback on Amazon.com is coming soon (ASIN B0HG3VN36K).
About this book
The guests, and the colleagues they talk about, appear in the book under pseudonyms; the episodes themselves, and the episode pages on this site, are where to hear them in their own words. Quoted speech in the book is verbatim from the recordings, and every episode behind each chapter is listed in its Note on Sources.