In this age of digital everything, it's easy to think that bioinformatics is a new discipline in biological science. It's trendy and uses the latest technologies to design, implement and analyse experiments. Molecular biology, on the other hand, was in use decades ago by the pioneers of biological research. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis was all the rage back then!
But what today's scientists might not realise is the groundwork for bioinformatics as we know it, was done by those pioneers. Those of us who learned to read a DNA sequence by hand and analysed polymorphisms by eye.
I fully appreciate the new skill set required by bioinformaticians, but feel a little sad that something is lost in the translation. There is a gap in the knowledge, of understanding how something was first described. That's progress for you!
To read more about science and the love of knowledge, click here.
To read more about science and the love of knowledge, click here.