I attended a seminar on Monday (1/31/11), hosted by Sage Bionetworks, called Establishing a ‘TCP/IP’ for Human Biology: A Summit on Human Data Interoperability. There were several interesting presentations and intriguing ideas presented. But I left feeling vaguely dissatisfied. So much money is being invested in building huge data repositories of related (and sometimes unrelated) data, but is it really the best way forward? Is there evidence that the best way to answer questions about human health is through large-scale genetic analyses? How do we know the science is good when data are stripped of their context and dumped into a repository? Is personalized medicine really achievable and worthwhile?
As the funding situation gets more and more difficult, is spending billions on large data repositories more cost-effective than focusing on smaller projects? Would it be better to focus more on prevention and less on curing preventable diseases? In short, is Big Science really better?
I enjoyed reading your blog post. You raise an interesting point. The choice of big or small sience depnds on the goal of the researh. Understnding the complexities of human biology requires large interdisciplinary studies and may involve finding minor variations between individuals or normal and disease states Analysis of large datasets is a componenet of these studies. Large dataset analysis may also be necessary for understanding how multiple genes infulence the onset of progression of a disease. Prevention may require an understanding of how a combination of factors leads to a disease or how to intervene at multiple steps of a disease pathway. The type of studies that Sage is doing are designed to shed light on the complexities of human biology.
I agree with you that repositories of data wiithout context are not optimal. But would scientists volunatrily add context if they regard doing so as extra work?