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{bio,medical} informatics

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

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The Informatics Review Doctors vs. Geeks

"Geeks started with nothing. No complex systems, no unknown processes, no mysteries of life. Information science sprang into being at most in a period of 75 years. Everything in a geek's universe, including his tools, the systems he builds on, and the things he creates were all the product of other geeks. Geeks are the ultimate controllers of their universe because they created it, which is a luxury not yet afforded the medical profession. It means that geeks can have ultimate knowledge of any of their system. One day, that will also be true for the medical profession. Once the human body is completely understood, it will cease to be the most complicated system we know of. Geeks will simulate it. That will by definition be a more complicated system. But it isn't the case now and that is where the biggest dichotomy comes from between geeks and doctors. Doctors deal with a mostly unknown system with emergent behaviors. There are virtually no information systems complicated enough to exhibit emergent behaviors yet. To a doctor, that means what geeks do is inherently less difficult."

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“Bioinformatics will be at the core of biology in the 21st century. In fields ranging from structural biology to genomics to biomedical imaging, ready access to data and analytical tools are fundamentally changing the way investigators in the life sciences conduct research and approach problems. Complex, computationally intensive biological problems are now being addressed and promise to significantly advance our understanding of biology and medicine. No biological discipline will be unaffected by these technological breakthroughs.”

BIOINFORMATICS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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