Bio-IT World | PerkinElmer has signed an agreement to acquire its Massachusetts neighbor, Caliper Life Sciences, for about $600 million. The acquisition is PerkinElmer's seventh this year, including CambridgeSoft and Geospiza.  

Bio-IT World | "Singapore needs a refresh, and perhaps I do as well,” says Edison Liu, the CEO-elect of The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), who reflected last week on his decade in Singapore and his priorities for his return next year to the US at the legendary mammalian genetics institute.  

Bio-IT World | Grants worth $25 millions over the next four years from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) will support researchers that are part of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network.The grants will fund research to demonstrate that patients' genomic information linked to disease characteristics and symptoms in their electronic medical records can be used to improve their care.    

Bio-IT World | The Skeptical Outsider | "Tell me how someone is compensated and I’ll tell you how they’ll behave,” goes the old adage. If non-monetary rewards are considered alongside financial remuneration this pretty much describes why federally funded research in the life sciences is producing less and less bang for more and more bucks. And why the scientific literature is at risk of becoming polluted with overreaching claims, obfuscated shortcomings, and non-reproducible results. 

Bio-IT World | Roughly five years ago the organizers of DREAM—Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—set out to find the best algorithms for inferring biological networks from blinded data sets. It turns out there's no such critter as the perfect algorthm.