Midterm #2 was a learning experience for me. Beyond getting to know an academic paper in great depth, one of the biggest lessons that midterm #2 taught me was that I should be more skeptical of what journal articles claim. This was especially clear to me when we did the group component of midterm #2. Through collaborative discussion, my group came to the consensus that the paper for midterm #2 presented data that showed a correlation between peculiarities of the Xi in female lymphocytes and predisposition of expression of normally silenced genes, but the findings presented were not sufficient to show a cause and effect relationship. In order to confidently establish a cause and effect relationship, the authors needed to perform a manipulative experiment to induce “the cause” (i.e. changing Xist RNA cloud localization patterns) to see if we can observe the expected effect (i.e. changes in gene expression). However, instead of performing a manipulative experiment, the authors performed an observational study, from which they could only observe correlations.
In the past, whenever I read journal articles, I always accepted the claims that researchers made. But from now on, I will be more skeptical of claims and think critically before I accept them.