Hacker News Reader

Comment by jyxent | Hacker News Reader

These are both the same paper. The earlier link points to the preprint. The paper has now been published in Science.

Touché. There's no shortage of these headlines though, here's one from 2003: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/science/once-again-scient...

To be fair, they address exactly that point in the first few sentences.

I don't think the content which addresses the title is OP's point, just the fact that there have been numerous publications with this title or something similar.

I'm not sure what the suggestion is here. Scientists should really work harder at their jobs and simplify the real world to the point that a headline that somebody absent mindedly read a decade ago don't sound repetitive?

I think the suggestion is that we should use the word "complete" when we mean it. Presumably, unlike say a software project, there is an actual state of completion possible in sequencing the human genome. Why has that mark been supposedly met so many times over the past couple of decades, only to be called complete again a few years later? When is it actually complete? Does it even matter anymore?

What human endeavor could ever be considered complete? What you propose is not a useful definition of the word.

If somebody completes a version of software, are they not allowed to announce future versions? Is scientific understanding not allowed to advance and change? Such views of science, as fixed and unchanging, with rigid definitions of inherently fuzzy concepts, are inherently anti-science.

Smart and correct rebuttal.

We all need to be able to live with the notion of levels of completeness. This is biology—not engineering.

What is the precise definition of a filled glass of water?

There is still room for improvement though, parts of the Y chromosome are still not there.

Is it gonna be GRCh39 or will they change the naming scheme again?

> [We] have decided to indefinitely postpone our next coordinate-changing update (GRCh39) while we evaluate new models and sequence content for the human reference assembly currently in development.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/grc

The complete Y chromosome from HG002 was added with v2 (after the paper was written). Probably a patched form of GRCh38 will be made using T2T sequence, but IMO it makes more sense to use T2T-CHM13 as a reference with its single origin instead of a weird chimera, at least until pan-genome graph methods mature.

We will be killing the archaic concept of a reference genome. All will some be dynamic pangenomic assemblies that grow and flex and branch as more genomes are added.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com