Mr. bushPilot,
Well I just posted the stuff as a bit of a background, wanted to establish that I am a working biologist, with a 20 year publication record, who is currently working with DNA, using it to identify species.
If you are going to be coy and manipulative about it, don't blame us for the natural reaction a lot of people are going to have to that behavior. It is the classic 'footer-hoaxer tactic. Look at Ketchum's site for example, pretending to be an outlet for information, except zero information is actually provided. Bait people, go on and on about it indirectly, make people guess, tease them, blame them for guessing wrong, etc.
When all you have to do is say "I study tardigrades". When someone puts this much effort into concealing what they do while saying their purpose is to tell you what they do - then you conclude this is a person who does the oppposite of what he says. It is not our fault when this is the evidence you submit.
No big deal. You are now providing some useful information, and maybe that "guess what I do for a living" introductory gamesmanship is behind us.
Primers 101: primers essentially allow for the multiplication of specific strands of DNA. Often the amount of cells, and consequently the amount of DNA in a collected sample, is quite small. in order for it to be worked with and identified, you need millions or billions of identical copies. Primers allow for the synthesis of those billions of identical copies. But you really don't want to copy all of the DNA, you typically have a target you are shooting for, a specific gene or sequence that contains within the DNA information that allows for identification. so when working with DNA you need to make Billions of identical copies of a snmall sequence of the DNA, and primers allow for that.
But depending on the species you are working with, and the scientific questions you are trying to answer, you will look at different parts of the DNA. And to isolate each of those parts, you use a different primer set.
Originally this was always the biggest hurdle in working with DNA - was finding a primer that allowed for the duplication (amplification is the term they use) of the specific section you are interested in. Now days you can buy specific primer packs from commercial suppliers for most any species, targeting whatever portion of DNA section you are working with.
So in working with DNA from BF? samples, I need to figure out what primers are being used "successfully". typically since BF is postulated to be between man and chimps or Gorrillas, and we have primer sets that work on chimps , gorrillas and humans equally well, thats what you would use. But I have seen some guys Blog refering to ketchum saying that they had to design their own primers - that the commercially available ones did not work!
That is very confusing to me, because I have also seen Ketchums "leaks" that in fact the DNA they have is "human" but barely so!
First there is no barely - either it falls with in the relm of human DNA - variation, or it does not!
second, and more interesting to me: If the DNA is within the "human" range - why would the readily available human primers not work? How is it that a human primer will not work on "human" DNA, but their designer primer does work, and gives human results.
I'm asking about primers, so I can try and duplicate her results - or at least make my results comparable, so using the same primer is part of the methodology! One of the basic tenants of research published in peer reviewed scientific literature is that anyone with the requisite skills and equipment can duplicate your experment, and get the same results. that is one of the real values of peer review, it allows for the scientific examination and validation of the original claims.
Thanks for that discussion. A number of us here have publication vitas, and can confirm this last part. I do mostly statistics stuff so if I say I did a specific estimation method on a data set, someone else has to get exactly the same result. The math all has to work out the same in your equations. I still get correspondence from people reading a paper I published in 1986 thinking that they got a different result because they took a total derivative of a key equation instead of a partial derivative.
Ostensibly Ketchum's facebook page was produced to make announcements and provide links to her research that would answer such questions, and since she has provided zero information we conclude the purpose is completely different.
What it does provide instead are all the excuses for why she cannot divulge anything about her research. Since it disseminates excuses, we must infer that is its purpose. Generally with con-men we have to watch what they are doing instead of listening to what they are saying, with those two things usually being the opposite of one another.
I wonder if using a different primer set is a way to make the results non-comparable, or non-reproducible. Like she uses battery acid - uranium mix for a primer, which surprisingly results in an indeterminant outcome. The mix is patented so nobody else can do it. Whatever. But it is clear to me from her behavior that whatever she did was really, really bad if measured by the word "science".
By hoaxing standards, she is holding her own.
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