Dealing with Next Generation Data: AAAS

[Joann]

In a special issue of Science Magazine on Dealing with Data, Feb 11, 2011 there is a perspective article about what to do with all the data:

On the Future of Genomic Data

DOI: 10.1126/science.1197891

There is currently free on-line access to this article to non-subscribers if you register your e-mail address at the Science website.

[Michael.James.Clark]

Nice, I was just about to post about this!

Link to the article http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/728.full

There's also an article about how genomic technology and data generation rate is outstripping our analytical capacity. It'll make you feel pretty good about job security if you're a bioinformaticist:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/666.full

What do others here think of this "data deluge" problem? I posted a lengthy post about it at my blog.

[Joann]

Note on permanent links to the literature

To all:

A digital librarian recently clued me in on how to provide a permanent link to the online literature using the best practices way and I am now trying to consistently post this method whenever possible. Thanks to Dorothea Salo, U. of Wisconsin.

So you just add http://dx.doi.org/ in front of the article's doi number!

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1197891

[csoong]

I always felt curious about job security for bioinformaticians in a lab that does sequence analysis. First of all, it's not an industrial environment where programmers could be promoted to become project managers and let fresh blood do the actual coding work. So there seems to be limited promotability. Second, once these sequence analysis pipeline gets more and more mature (and/or graphically friendly), eventually the skills needed by the labs doing these analysis would be simply some shell scripting and perl programming, which is what a lot of bioinformaticians are doing nowadays already. And, as days pass on, shell and perl programming will be picked up by either PI himself or a grad student. How would a bioinformatician secure his job and earn his credit?

[Michael.James.Clark]

I always felt curious about job security for bioinformaticians in a lab that does sequence analysis. First of all, it's not an industrial environment where programmers could be promoted to become project managers and let fresh blood do the actual coding work. So there seems to be limited promotability. Second, once these sequence analysis pipeline gets more and more mature (and/or graphically friendly), eventually the skills needed by the labs doing these analysis would be simply some shell scripting and perl programming, which is what a lot of bioinformaticians are doing nowadays already. And, as days pass on, shell and perl programming will be picked up by either PI himself or a grad student. How would a bioinformatician secure his job and earn his credit?

Good thoughts. My opinion is a bit more optimistic, I suppose.

I think, actually, that the bioinformatics field will be very similar to the programming/engineer type of job. In those jobs, as I'm sure you know, upward mobility to project management is pretty common if it's what the employee desires. I think the field is in its infancy, but will be expanding a great deal in the coming years.

As for limited job security related to your last question, I think that's contingent upon the technology stagnating, which is something I do not see happening. If anything, I think our technology is going to continually advance and, at the same time, become more and more common generally. Whereas now bioinformaticists are mostly confined to biotech companies, universities and huge hospitals, in the future there is likely to be a need for them at any hospital, smaller institutions and, probably, outsourced analysis companies (which don't really exist yet, but I think they will).

So while it's true that there will be a cap on the need for "technician" type bioinformaticists in labs, I think we're far from it yet. And moreover, I think we're far from the point where our analytical tools and pipelines are finalized. Both because the technology will be advancing and because the current analytical tools are, quite frankly, not optimal yet even for our current tech.

[xgenseq]

Technology is ever changing and if bioinformaticians key their eyes and enhances their skills they will be always a secured job as any other technology-oriented job like automobile engineers. James has already provided a good insight for this query.