If you guys remember all of the big genome sequencing projects
of the 90s and the early aughts, they’ve been continuing and the
amount of raw data they have been giving back to us has
exponentially accelerated. However, those of us trying to
understand the biological realities of what all of those
sequences actually mean were very quickly left behind and have
been falling further and further behind as the advance of
sequencing technology accelerates faster than we could ever hope
to keep up with. The central problem is that while it turns out
that we can get computers to do our pipetting for us if we pay
engineers enough – we can’t get computers to do our thinking for
us. Like mathematicians with some of the fanciest calculators
imaginable, we can get the tools NCBI gives us to show us
amazing things in amazing ways, but they can’t tell us what it
all means. For the genomes we get to make any kind of sense a
human being has to abstract meaning from it and communicate that
meaning in understandable language –