IT Spending in Life Sciences

dano1992 writes "From Cnet: Computers replace petri dishes in biological labs. "The life sciences field is poised to spend billions on IT due to a need to manage an explosion in biosciences data, and a desire on the part of drug companies to streamline drug development." But the folk who'll catch the best part of the wave are those who can work with clusters, databases and storage on a massive scale."

Comments

Open Source molecular biology software

[holy zarquon's singi]

A lot of the molecular biology software is open source. Much of it is unlicenced. Alot of the software available is bereft of software licences. Some has weird licencing conditions, and can be difficult to obtain for non commercial purposes. Many molecular biologists have a gap in their computer literacy. I think that there's definately a market for a knoppix style cd that includes a large suite of molecular biology tools, database software (probably postgresql) and good documentation, so that the poor molecular biologists who've been suffering from using windows all these years can return to a real scientific computing environment. There are many good analysis tools available for unix, but few good presentation tools. A nice genome drawing package that outputs [encapsulated] postscript, as well as documentation explaining what these weird file formats are for would be really good. The combination of a self documenting self configuring linux distribution with built in clustering support would be very well received if the scientists could be eased into changing their computing platforms.