123Bioinformatics

Recently I stumbled upon a very very interesting Article about Past, Present and Future of Bioinformatics in Genome Biology by Dr. Lincoln D Stein, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada. Here I am giving some interesting comments from this article titled “Bioinformatics: alive and kicking“.

Abstract:

Bioinformatics has become too central to biology to be left to specialist bioinformaticians. Biologists are all bioinformaticians now.

He says that,

In 2003, Dr. Lincoln D. Stein gave a talk in O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called ‘Bioinformatics:Gone in 2012’. In this conference he predicted that “Bioinformatics would be gone in ten years“. In the same year biotech and pharma realized they had significantly over invested in bioinformatics and started large-scale layoffs. And even O’Reilly never sponsored any Bioinformatics conference. So Dr. Lincoln D.Stein felt that His prediction came true and He was the villain who triggered the collapse.

His argument was that information management was so fundamental to the biological sciences that bioinformatics would be absorbed into the mainstream biological curriculum just like the techniques of molecular biology, sequencing and macromolecular separations.

“Average biologist has become far more computer-savvy than he or she was in 2003. It is now routine for wet labs to maintain Wikis to organize their papers and protocols, and unexceptional to see an enterprising graduate student or postdoc create a relational database to manage the results from a complex set of experiments.”

“With all these training and online resources available, one would think there would be less need for card-carrying bioinformaticians, and my personal experience suggests that this is the case. Eight years ago, at the height of the bioinformatics bubble, pharmaceutical companies and other industry players were offering big premiums to qualified bioinformaticians. However, as of 2008, The Scientist’s annual salary survey reported a median income of US$85,000 for all of the life sciences in the United States, while the OpenWetWare bioinformatics career survey found a median income of just US$70,000 for self-identified bioinformaticians in North America.“

“On the other hand, bioinformatics as a named discipline is stronger than ever. A decade ago at the annual Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting, the bioinformatics session would be offered early on Sunday morning (the last day of the meeting) and was sparsely attended. Now bioinformatics
pervades the entire meeting; every talk has a strong bioinformatics or computational biology component, and the talks that are heavy in computational biology are always among those that are most heavily attended.”

Conclusion:

“So bioinformatics isn’t disappearing. But who is giving these bioinformatics talks, and making and analyzing these large databases? By and large these are not people who call themselves bioinformaticians. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of a new generation of computational biologists who spend part of their time at the bench and part of their time at the computer.

Particularly eye-opening for me has been my recent experience at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, where I have been recruiting principal investigators for the new Informatics and Biocomputing Department. Almost all the young investigators that I have interviewed have asked about bench space, laboratory equipment and supplies.

Clearly these researchers see themselves as biologists first and foremost; for them bioinformatics is a technique to be used, not a speciality to follow. A career limited to computational data management and analysis alone is too confining a niche for them; they want to take control of the datasets they generate, and temper theoretical models with empirical tests. Even I am seeing the writing on the wall, and have started to spec out the equipment for a modest wet lab of my own.”

Bioinformaticians : gone by 2012. Bioinformatics: stronger than ever.

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