Biosilico 2003: The Data Tsunami

We seem to be heading for vocabulary exhaustion. In a time when “extreme” is a common marketing adjective we’re running out of superlatives. So the term “tsunami”—the biggest of all waves—was used at BIOSILICO to describe the rate of data generation in life science. And just as a tsunami slamming the coastline is a big problem, the wealth of data pouring in to genomic and proteomic databases is overwhelming the ability of scientists to figure it out and of engineers to build computer systems that can handle it.

READ MORE

Exa what?

Yahoo! News – 5 ‘exabytes’ of information created in ’02, report says

If you feel like you’re drowning in stuff coming through your computer, it’s official: you are.

Biosilico 2003

Thanks to the FI Center I was able to attend a conference at Stanford a little while ago called BIOSILICO 2003 organized by Scientific American.

It’s taken me a while to let the deluge of technical information and bioinformatics industry insider-jargon settle into a few themes that I can pull together. Over the next few days I’d like to recap the conference, not according to the agenda, but by what seem to be the indicators of developments in this important area of life science.

You might be thinking: What does this have to do with cancer? Well, the most frequently mentioned biological phenomenon at this conference was cancer. Everybody mentioned cancer, not so much the way a person with the disease would see it or even the way doctors think about it, but as the biggest challenge in life science—the Gordian knot of biology, if you will.

First theme: bioinformatics, the offspring of biology and information technology.

READ MORE

Things are changing

InfoWorld: Tech CEOs defend offshore outsourcing: October 22, 2003: By Tom Sullivan: Platforms

“U.S. domination of the IT era has ended … and the prosperity enjoyed by developed nations is cascading down to developing nations, at least those that embrace the information age.”