One of the things that jumped out at me at SC09 as I sat through some talks on the challenges of handling the scale that we are beginning to face in the life sciences (I say beginning, cause we’re still in the early days) was that we are still not thinking about this in a manner that matches the rapid innovation that is happening at the instrument level. We innovate rapidly in instrument design. Even in the absence of innovation, we are facing a lot of change at the same time that we are generating more and more data. Unfortunately, our solutions are being developed on a traditional academic time scale and funding cycle, which from what I’ve experienced and continue to see, are not agile enough to keep pace with the rate of change or the type of change required. Operational scale, programming practices, algorithms at scale, those are not the things that get funded or recognized in the current model.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. There is a acceptance that change needs to happen and a set of folks who are forging new paths and institutions that are taking a more holistic view of how operational change needs to happen, plus I’d like to think that some of the folks who will make this happen are the kind that form the Biogang.
When timescales do not match
One of the things that jumped out at me at SC09 as I sat through some talks on the challenges of handling the scale that we are beginning to face in the life sciences (I say beginning, cause we’re still in the early days) was that we are still not thinking about this in a manner that matches the rapid innovation that is happening at the instrument level. We innovate rapidly in instrument design. Even in the absence of innovation, we are facing a lot of change at the same time that we are generating more and more data. Unfortunately, our solutions are being developed on a traditional academic time scale and funding cycle, which from what I’ve experienced and continue to see, are not agile enough to keep pace with the rate of change or the type of change required. Operational scale, programming practices, algorithms at scale, those are not the things that get funded or recognized in the current model.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. There is a acceptance that change needs to happen and a set of folks who are forging new paths and institutions that are taking a more holistic view of how operational change needs to happen, plus I’d like to think that some of the folks who will make this happen are the kind that form the Biogang.