Steve Henikoff, a geneticist and molecular biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, was quoted on Coyne’s blog: “Mukherjee seemed not to realize that transcription factors occupy the top of the hierarchy of epigenetic information,” he wrote. “Histone modifications at most act as cogs in the machinery.”
Coyne’s two blog posts about
The New Yorker article each gathered more than 100 comments, many of them from scientists. Richard Mann, a molecular biologist and biophysicist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, noted that the article mentioned histones 26 times without a single mention of the word transcription. “Only a talmudic-like reading can reveal a hint that something other than histone modifications are at play.”
In a
response published on the website of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, Mukherjee thanked his critics for their “immensely detailed comments”. Speaking to
Nature, Mukherjee says that, after re-reading the story, he felt that he put too much emphasis on the “speculative” roles of histone modification and DNA methylation. “This was an error,” he says, adding that a mention of transcription factors could have helped to avoid “an unnecessarily polarizing reading of the piece”. He says that
The New Yorker is “very likely” to run a response.
