Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
happened . . . was that you started to lower the salary that you
would pay to the bioinformaticians, because those people are
commodities; any failed startup company, you could go and fi nd
anybody who could do this stuff. Anybody with a statistics back-
ground, those people you can't fi nd anywhere on a corner . . .
so those people you would put a premium on. . . . [Bioinformati-
cians] are just a tool . . . you're a tool, you're a shovel . . . go put
together a database of this many sequences and make it run on
the BLAST-farm while I go and do the tweaking of BLAST.
Although not all biologists saw the divisions quite this starkly, an ob-
servable difference certainly existed between the so-called bioinformati-
cians and the so-called computational biologists. Although they both
spent the vast majority of their time in front of computers, the two
groups usually occupied different workspaces within the institutes and
laboratories, ate lunch separately, and went to different parties.
5
As is suggested in the quotation above, however, the two groups
are also performing different sorts of tasks. For the one group, those
tasks were often described as “informatic”: building and maintaining
databases, running BLAST queries on sequences, running data through
a pipeline of ready-made software tools, or perhaps building and main-
taining a website of biological data. “Computational” tasks, on the
other hand, included data analysis with sophisticated statistics, design-
ing and improving algorithms for sequence analysis, and implementing
sophisticated mathematical models for reducing biological data.
6
It will
be useful to provide one detailed example of each from my fi eldwork:
: : :
Informatics
: Helen is working at her computer. A biologist from
the wet lab enters her offi ce and explains an experiment he is
doing on epitope tags
7
in a particular species of bacteria. The
biologist needs Helen to fi nd out what epitopes have been char-
acterized for this organism and provide him with a list. This
is a diffi cult task because it involves pulling information from
published papers and potentially from databases. After several
days of research scouring journals and the web, Helen puts to-
gether a list of online databases containing epitope tags. Being
a skilled programmer, rather than retrieving the information by
hand, she writes a program to pull the information off the web
