Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10.8 Personnel skill sets
The need for bioinformatics programming skills is becoming a necessity
within biology and medicine [41]; there is now a requirement for scientists
to have access to bioinformatics support and there is currently a lack of
such expertise. As reported at the UK parliament by the Science and
Technology Committee in their
Second Report on Genomic Medicine
[42], Professor Sir John Bell stated that 'the really crucial thing to train in
the UK will be bioinformaticians—people who can handle data—the
truth is we have now hit the wall in terms of data handling and
management'.
This requirement is due to the exponential growth in data being
generated, coupled with the increasingly detailed questions being asked
of it. Although there are some degree and postgraduate courses in
bioinformatics, there is also the opportunity for personal development
through self-education and experience. What was once defi ned as 'would
be nice to have', bioinformatics programming skills are now more of an
'essential' across many fi elds of biology. This is due to an increased
awareness of what may be done and also the massive increase in the
amount of data being generated. This all needs to be processed, stored
and re-used as required. Similarly, biological information is distributed
now thus adding web skills to an already bulging list of requirements in
the bioinformatics tool bag.
There are a wide range of skills within the group, and these can be
either technical or soft skills. On the technical side there is an
absolute requirement to be computer-literate, being comfortable
working on the command-line in a Linux environment in the fi rst instance
and then building up knowledge and experience with all the built-in
tools. Utilities such as the stream editor Sed and the data extraction
utility Awk are invaluable in manipulating basic data fi les
but, as per the Perl motto (TIMTOWTDI; pronounced 'Tim Toady'),
there is more than one way to do it. Following on from this is profi ciency
in at least one programming language; in my experience this is normally
a scripting language such as Perl or Python, which as well as being easy
to learn have vast repositories of (free) libraries available. The same can
be said for other languages such as Java that offer object-orientated
desktop and server-based applications. There is a tendency to perhaps
'forget' just how rich the landscape of libraries for software developers
really is, and how much this has contributed to powerful scientifi c
software.
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