When I gave one of my first talks at my current workplace on Perl, BLAST and genomic analysis, a nameless audience member asked me a question I have never forgotten. "It strikes me that what you're doing is rather desperate", she said, "wouldn't you be better off doing some experiments?"
At the time, I was rendered almost speechless (there is no polite way to answer such a question), but I've since learned that many biologists (at least at my current workplace...) are not aware of the paradigm shift brought about by computational biology. Namely, rather than stumble about choosing research topics and experiments almost at random, you can make intelligent use of information (i.e. process it computationally) and use that as a way to direct and focus your research.
The folks at the UGA CSB Lab seem to understand that, so next time you're faced with such a question, direct your questioner to something like this Powerpoint (sorry) slide.
Comments
Paradigm shift
That is an excellent presentation, I still doubt whether or not it will sink in for certain academics.
We [the usual suspects] are aware of the paradigm shift mentioned in the presentation. Why isn't everyone else ?
On a related note, I highly recommend this paper:
Evolving from Bioinformatics in-the-Small to Bioinformatics-in-the-Large (pdf).
for anyone considering the technical implications of the so-called computational biology paradigm shift.
Re: paradign shift
The link text does not seem right. Could it be corrected ?
Fixed
I had a new line in the URI that was being converted to a break. I really need to update the CMS...