While bioinformatics is a very interesting and exciting area, it is also a very small field... [snip] Bioinformatics companies have a very limited number of potential clients...
As a PhD student in bioinformatics, I must say I strongly disagree with you. I see a future where biologists will have to accuire computer skills as well as laboratory skills, in order to be able to analyze their data. Those with computer skills will be the ones who analyze the data and draw the conclusions, while those who merely do lab work will fall behind and end up producing the data for the analysists. In my lab, not one single person at a research position performs lab work only, and a not-so-bold statement would be that this is true for everybody who does research at my department (Dept. of Genetics and Pathology, University of Uppsala).
Previously, a typical question for a biologist could be: "I have these two genes, I wonder how they interact and how they are expressed under different conditions". Nowadays, the question would most likely rather be: "I have these expression profiles from a microarray chip conatining 5000 genes, I wonder if information about this and that biological pathway can be extracted".
My guess is that we have yet to see the big breakthrough of bioinformatics. The bioinformatics companies have not only pharmaceutical companies as potential customers - every business and academical institution with their foot in biology is a potential target. This includes hospitals, departments at universities, biotech companies who develop hardware for bioanalysis etc.
What we see now is a booming development, where small bioinformatics companies surface by the minute. A lot of these companies will of course go down the drain (the industry bears more than a few similarities with the dotcom-industry), but the big picture suggests that bioinformatics is still in its wake and will take a dominant position in the future of life sciences.
The "mathamatical proof" By Alan Natapof has some flaws. For instance, Natapof claims that the elector process is similar to baseball games in the World Series, where the winning team doesn't necessarily hit most of the total amount of home runs, but rather wins most of the total amount of games.
However, there's a major difference: in an election you know beforehand how many voters ("home runs") you have, and it can therefore be argued that the winner of the popular vote should win the election. A baseball game with a previously determined number of home runs would be pretty ridiculous if the winning team didn't score the most runs.
Just my $0.02/arneMan
Slashdot Mirror
...wasn't this up last week?
2 0202
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/23/22
aM
While bioinformatics is a very interesting and exciting area, it is also a very small field...
[snip]
Bioinformatics companies have a very limited number of potential clients...
As a PhD student in bioinformatics, I must say I strongly disagree with you. I see a future where biologists will have to accuire computer skills as well as laboratory skills, in order to be able to analyze their data. Those with computer skills will be the ones who analyze the data and draw the conclusions, while those who merely do lab work will fall behind and end up producing the data for the analysists. In my lab, not one single person at a research position performs lab work only, and a not-so-bold statement would be that this is true for everybody who does research at my department (Dept. of Genetics and Pathology, University of Uppsala).
Previously, a typical question for a biologist could be: "I have these two genes, I wonder how they interact and how they are expressed under different conditions". Nowadays, the question would most likely rather be: "I have these expression profiles from a microarray chip conatining 5000 genes, I wonder if information about this and that biological pathway can be extracted".
My guess is that we have yet to see the big breakthrough of bioinformatics. The bioinformatics companies have not only pharmaceutical companies as potential customers - every business and academical institution with their foot in biology is a potential target. This includes hospitals, departments at universities, biotech companies who develop hardware for bioanalysis etc.
What we see now is a booming development, where small bioinformatics companies surface by the minute. A lot of these companies will of course go down the drain (the industry bears more than a few similarities with the dotcom-industry), but the big picture suggests that bioinformatics is still in its wake and will take a dominant position in the future of life sciences.
Just my $0.02,
/Erik
The "mathamatical proof" By Alan Natapof has some flaws. For instance, Natapof claims that the elector process is similar to baseball games in the World Series, where the winning team doesn't necessarily hit most of the total amount of home runs, but rather wins most of the total amount of games. However, there's a major difference: in an election you know beforehand how many voters ("home runs") you have, and it can therefore be argued that the winner of the popular vote should win the election. A baseball game with a previously determined number of home runs would be pretty ridiculous if the winning team didn't score the most runs. Just my $0.02 /arneMan