I’m lucky and grateful to have been recommended by George Church for Genome Technology’s Seventh Annual Young Investigators. The profile they wrote — “Madeleine Price Ball: Free the Data” — is really nice. Or at least it was, if I recall correctly. I talked about how important it is for scientists to share information freely (in particular, human genome and interpretation data).

How ironic is it that it’s behind a subscription block?

I had mixed feelings about the interview, as I knew this would happen. At least the GenomeWeb account doesn’t cost anything. It does, however, require a password containing at least one of each of the following: uppercase character, lowercase character, number, and punctuation. And… it does this all over “http”, not “https”. Since GenomeWeb is apparently encouraging you to send one of your favorite super-secure passwords all around the internets in plaintext, I’m reluctant to recommend making an account there.