Public databases impact not only how research is done but what kind of research is done in the first place.
The setting: a scientific conference in January 2008. The speaker, Bruce Ponder, MD, PhD, an oncology professor at Cambridge University, is describing a previously unknown link between a particular...
Oct, 01, 2008
Getting cheap, reliable help from lay workers
In pre-Internet days, people sought expert advice for their purchasing decisions—consulting product ratings in magazines such as Consumer Reports and reading newspaper reviews of local dining...
Jun, 03, 2015
Avi Ma'ayan hopes for improvements in the evaluation of biomedical academic software development projects
With the increasing diversity of assays that produce massive quantities of data, experimental labs are becoming more and more dependent on software tools and online databases, as well as...
Nov, 01, 2016
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Resolving conflicts among databases
Pharmaceutical research is notoriously expensive. To find safe and effective drugs cost-effectively, some researchers seek new uses for medications that have already leaped the hurdles of the FDA...
Jun, 18, 2014
It's an exhilarating time for genome-wide association studies
For the past few months it seemed you couldn’t open a journal without reading results of a new genome-wide association study. The results kept pouring in: four studies in April showing seven...
Oct, 01, 2007
A prototype for integrated datasets
For years now, biocomputational scientists have been talking about the need for better data integration. “People talk a lot about how data are in silos and not connected,” says Avi Ma...
Nov, 01, 2016
An exploration of data-driven and process-driven approaches to data privacy
Trust. It’s the basis of every patient/physician interaction: Shared personal health information is kept confidential and used only for the patient’s benefit. It’s a tradition that...
Jan, 02, 2012
A pair of challenges increasingly threaten the success of bioinformatics research: convincing biologists to share their data and convincing computational colleagues to share their code. Many of us...
Jul, 01, 2006
How to tap into this cost-effective and flexible solution
Biomedical researchers who work with large data sets may run out of both disk space and patience while waiting for a computation to finish. Though buying more hard drives and faster computers may...
Mar, 01, 2014
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