I thought the news that Astra Zeneca was closing the legendary ex-ICI research facility at Alderley Park was bad enough but now they announce 2,300 more job cuts, UK portion unspecified. And it is refocusing: “It will cut spending on neuroscience and antibiotics”. Antibiotics? Those are the drugs the UK Chief Medical Officer says we separately need revived to cope with drug resistance.

Meanwhile, I hardly need to add, the CEO walks off with banker-style bonuses: a golden hello last year of £4m, and to come a 180% performance related annual bonus. So it’s all about him and not about the ostensible purpose of the company: to make the drugs we need.

Having written only two weeks ago about the fate of ICI, once Britain’s’ largest industrial company, now no more, I discover that the story has got even worse. The demise of ICI began when in 1999, they hived off the more profitable pharmaceuticals wing to form Zeneca.  The old ICI research centre at Alderley Park, source of the innovation that drove Zeneca lived on as a research base for the new company.

But no longer. Today we hear that the centre will close with the loss of 550 jobs.  Another 1650 will be relocated to the new Astra Zeneca research HQ in Cambridge. Not all loss then but why should all of Britain's remaining hi-tech expertise be in Cambridge?  George Osborne helped to secure a £5 million grant for Alderley only a few months ago and now the North will lose yet another of its major companies. For whom, quite, does this make sense?

According to Daniel Taylor in the Observer, Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson defends his way with the press by saying: "Do ICI send an email to another biochemicals company telling them their new discoveries in drugs?" For Sir Alex, a Scot living and working in the north of England, ICI was a byword for most of his life and so he still reaches for it to make a point.

But ICI hasn’t existed for 7 years. Its demise was one of Britain’s greatest industrial tragedies. Of course, in a sense it lives on, because in 1993 ICI hived off its more successful pharmaceuticals division to form Zeneca. Zeneca is now  a multinational giant having merged with the Swedish firm Astra in 1999 to form Astra-Zeneca.

Astra-Zeneca’s largest research facility is still the ex-ICI labs at Alderley Park, Cheshire, not too far from Manchester. So Sir Alex could have simply substituted “Astra-Zeneca” for ICI but we can’t pretend that something hasn’t been lost in the process.

In September 2012, under the banner ENCODE, a barrage of 30 papers appeared in leading journals, accompanied by a media blitz under the heading “Junk DNA is dead: 80% of the human genome has some biochemical function”.

This instantly raised a few eyebrows. It is generally believed that maybe 50% of the human genome consists of viral fragments. A very few of these have been shown to be functional, especially the gene for the protein syncytin, active in the placenta. But most of the 50% comprises inactivated viral remains of infections. Question: how many world-class genome biologists does it take to realise that 50 + 80 cannot a genome make?

Now, a paper by Dan Graur has alerted the media to the flaws in the ENCODE papers and a media storm has erupted.

It seems that the consortium knew that the figure of 80% was misleading but as blog on the Nature (publisher of 6 of the papers) website put it: “The 80% number may not have been ideal, but it did provide a headline figure that was impressive to the mainstream media”. Since when has reporting scientific results that are known to be “not ideal” been acceptable? Has science really sunk this low in order to court publicity?

This 80% nonsense does great damage to the real understanding of regulatory genes in what was formerly known as junk DNA. Even if this comprises 2% of the genome, that is twice the protein-coding component. Worse than that: if scientists have been caught out playing with figures as gross as this 80% it’s a godsend to the lobby-fuelled sceptics who don’t believe in evolution or global warming.