IT Spending in Life Sciences 11
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."
So... (Score:1, Interesting)
Nobel Prizes (Score:2, Insightful)
Not gray goo! (Score:3, Informative)
IT enables, not replaces (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't very realistic. Data collection is still the major driving force in life science discovery. Good IT infrastructure enables large screens, but only in conjuction with robotics, microfluidics, sweat, and a lot of disposable plastic, including petri dishes.
Modeling biological systems is a difficult task. As Hiroaki Kitano [cvbig.org] points out, "[in biological systems] large numbers of functionally diverse, and frequently multifunctional, sets of elements interact selectively and nonlinearly to produce coherant rather than complex behaviours". There are still a huge number of elements and relationships to discover.
Yes... and no. (Score:5, Interesting)
While these programs are very helpful, they often contain shortcuts that reduce compute time. More compute crunch essentially means that these shortcuts can be removed and deeper/wider/more accurate analysis results. Which is good.
That said, more raw crunch and capacity brings in other issues such as capacity, I/O, network, concurrence, version control, security, recovery, UPS, climate and so on and so forth. The new iron, in other words, needs looking after. So some of the new hardware is there simply to look after the other hardware, if you get my drift.
Remember, there is more to drug discovery than meets the eye. Living systems are extremely complex. Drugs or hypotheses that look great in silico do not always pass muster in vitro never mind the real world. Moreover, FDA approval still relies on squirting compounds into cells, rats, humans etc. Until the FDA permits in silico proof of efficacy, toxicity, LD50 etc, we will need to maintain "traditional" avenues for experimentation.
It is good stuff, though and I for one welcome the investment in new compute capacity. I am keen however that no-one is seduced by the headlines; a lot of hard work has to be done in the lab to corroborate the evidence uncovered by the computers. In my experience the data is academically interesting but is only the beginning in terms of delivering an effective therapy to the patient.
Not knocking it - merely a reality check!
Open Source molecular biology software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Source molecular biology software (Score:5, Insightful)
looking for a job? here' one. (Score:2, Informative)
Managing the mountians of data (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I work there.