Sandra Porter points us to the 10th anniversary edition of Bioinform. I have met quite a few chemists-turned-structural biologists-turned-bioinformaticians over the years, mostly people about my age. Back then, biologists did not know computers and the chemists knew some biology. In my case, I knew FORTRAN (stop laughing) and Perl, so the move into bioinformatics was not that hard, but to this day, I wish I had studied more molecular biology. The things that have taken a lot of reading and self study would have been so much more obvious. Luckily, I believe there are a lot more molecular biologists who can write code and have a decent knowledge of statistics today. The ultimate dream, the person who is equally comfortable with biology, stats and computer science. I believe I even know a few people who fit that description.
Sandra also pulls out a quote by Lincoln Stein
I hope to see bioinformatics becoming a tool like molecular biology that everybody uses, and that the software we’re developing now will become as easy and as standard to use as a pipettor. You don’t read for the guy who knows how to run pipettors when you need to pipette something. You reach for the pipettor yourself….
It’s always been my opinion that if we treat bioinformatics as just another tool in the hands of a scientist, the field will always benefit from it. As long as there are those who know how to develop methods and write good software, 75% of bioinformatics-oriented tasks should be done by “biologists”, while the remaining 25% will likely remain in the hands of the specialized expert.
Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Molecular Biology, Education
2 Comments
Well I would say we are quite far away from that..just spent the morning trying to fetch 772 sequences from swissprot..I cannot do that very easily yet..also even simple cross database lookup is a nightmare..Q57LU9_SALCH is somthing only Uniprot understands..the NCBI has no idea what that is..
So I am stuck reading about wsdl and soap..
Maybe one day I can just say “computer take this list and get me the sequences from anywhere..and make sure they are all unique and then plot for me a histogram of molecular weight across all 772 species”
Well I would say we are quite far away from that..just spent the morning trying to fetch 772 sequences from swissprot..I cannot do that very easily yet..also even simple cross database lookup is a nightmare..Q57LU9_SALCH is somthing only Uniprot understands..the NCBI has no idea what that is..
So I am stuck reading about wsdl and soap..
Maybe one day I can just say “computer take this list and get me the sequences from anywhere..and make sure they are all unique and then plot for me a histogram of molecular weight across all 772 species”
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[...] 20th, 2007 · No Comments My good friend Deepak had a quote in his blog from Lincoln Stein about making bioinformatics asmuch an everyday tool to the practicing biologist as a pipettor ( a device used to dispense liquids by experimental biologists and chemists).. [...]
[...] Yesterday, I blogged about removing barriers to bioinformatics. It would appear that we are not quite there yet. [...]