mealtime small talk
The other day I was sitting next to a scientist at a banquet, a genomicist to be more precise. Genomics is hot hot hot right now. With the advancement of technology bringing an increase in speed and decrease in price, it's all about the study of the sequence. And the hope that by mining the data locked therein we will find a way to live longer and better, if not forever.
It seems to be a clean kind of science with a different process and a different rhythm - divided between those in production who run the platforms and those who write the algorithms, do the statistical analysis and stare at the data.
For those of us who have done a more traditional kind of science, we can only wonder whether it is time to put down the pipette and shut down the micriscope because this is the future or eventually this storm will run its course and we will be able to use the huge amounts of data that come out to help us guide our more old-school means of investigation.
But I digress. At dinner, my companion asked me where I thought the next questions in biology were - the "next big thing." And I gave the standard pat answers: evolution and the brain - the biology of cognition.
Which today seems to be to be incredibly short sighted. Those are the next questions that follow our reductionist and model organism driven means of inquiry.
But really it's not a question of next questions. The true question in biology is as it has always been. Life. Each living thing has developed highly sophisticated and individualized strategies to survive and thrive. A diversity of possibility and application that living things have developed in response to opportunity - all out there to be observed and studied, to be quantified and characterized, to be tested and to be understood. And it's all around us and inside us. That is and was always the question.
It seems to be a clean kind of science with a different process and a different rhythm - divided between those in production who run the platforms and those who write the algorithms, do the statistical analysis and stare at the data.
For those of us who have done a more traditional kind of science, we can only wonder whether it is time to put down the pipette and shut down the micriscope because this is the future or eventually this storm will run its course and we will be able to use the huge amounts of data that come out to help us guide our more old-school means of investigation.
But I digress. At dinner, my companion asked me where I thought the next questions in biology were - the "next big thing." And I gave the standard pat answers: evolution and the brain - the biology of cognition.
Which today seems to be to be incredibly short sighted. Those are the next questions that follow our reductionist and model organism driven means of inquiry.
But really it's not a question of next questions. The true question in biology is as it has always been. Life. Each living thing has developed highly sophisticated and individualized strategies to survive and thrive. A diversity of possibility and application that living things have developed in response to opportunity - all out there to be observed and studied, to be quantified and characterized, to be tested and to be understood. And it's all around us and inside us. That is and was always the question.
posted by ergo at 7:26 AM
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