Biology is a very, very different discipline from the one I began to study thirty years ago when I started graduate school at Stanford.1 Entire genomes are sequenced routinely where once we were lucky to know the sequence of a single gene. Theoreticians, like me, depended on computers in our research, but for everyone else the only time they used a computer was when they needed to do a complicated statistical analysis in SAS.2 Now it's difficult to imagine any biologist surviving without a computer and an internet connection, whether downloading sequences from Genbank, inferring phylogenies,3, or inferring rates of gene flow, computers are an essential part of the modern biologists toolkit.
Writing in Nature Genetics Lincoln Stein outlines a vision of the future for cyberinfrastructure in biology. The whole article is worth reading, but if you can't wait for the punchline, here it is:
This is an exciting time for biology. The projects that are now in progress or just getting under way point towards a future in which scientific collaborations will be unimpeded by geographic constraints or by limited access to data. Just as it is now inconceivable to do science without access to a personal computer and e-mail, in a decade the cyberinfrastructure will be an absolutely indispensable part of the biological researcher's equipment.
1Yes, I really am that old.
2My first copy of Sokal & Rohlf's Biometry had advice on how to streamline ANOVA calculations with mechanical calculators.
3Whether using parsimony, likelihood,or Bayesian approaches, the days are long past when the data sets were small and simple enough for hand calculation.
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