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comment by 45usp
45usp  ·  4077 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A farewell to bioinformatics

I agree. The author certainly sounds like he's had some negative experiences in that field. It's true that a lot of times the 'bioinformatics component' of a research project consists entirely of a phylogenetic tree generation and a multiple sequence alignment. It's also true that at some point some key people and research groups stopped mining their data for informative results and simply started accruing massive datasets, hoping that someone else (bioinformaticists, I guess) would have the mindset and/or develop the tools necessary to do meaningful analyses of those datasets. I have my own personal tale of working in the same institute with someone who made some very pretty pictures by analyzing massive sets of protein sequences, and using grid computing environments to handle the numbers-crunching. It was hailed as a big success and a perfect marriage between high performance computing, bioinformatics, and basic bench science. But it was ultimately worthless because we learned nothing new.





thundara  ·  4077 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I have my own personal tale of working in the same institute with someone who made some very pretty pictures by analyzing massive sets of protein sequences, and using grid computing environments to handle the numbers-crunching.

Well, you've gotta have tool and method development as at least a fraction of research. He might not have answered any scientific questions, but I also contribute to the development of software for other scientists and I can certainly point to plenty of examples of its worth, both in improving performance and feature set.

If anything, not enough effort is put to that category of research. Molecular dynamic simulations can take days to run, but most computational biologists in that field care more about proving the correctness of their results than optimizing performance.