Digital Biology

Today is the last day of the conference Digital Biology: The Emerging Paradigm.  At the webpage, two purposes for the conference are listed:

To demonstrate how computational approaches to biomedical research have yielded breakthroughs that advance the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease

To identify national research needs and opportunities in the computational and quantitative sciences critical to the future of biomedical discovery

A recent article on the meeting appeared in Nature Science Update.  It provides a glimpse of the kind of issues to be addressed in the coming years:

At the moment, it is a struggle to link a patient’s genetic profile with their brain scans and the latest clinical studies. It’s like a primitive PC running incompatible word-processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs, says Erik Jakobsson of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, who helped to convene the meeting. "We’re way behind in making it all work together," he says.

Interoperability is a big issue.  The biotech industry launched the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C) in 2001 with the mission to "eliminate barriers to application interoperability, data integration, and knowledge flow."  Although, the extent to which I3C pursues formal standards has emerged as a point of contention for at least one member, Sun Microsystems, who recently left the consortium.

UPDATE: More coverage of the symposium here.

November 7, 2003 | Filed Under standards 

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