Network Biology 2.0 part 1

The first day of the network biology symposium ended and I have a few impressions about the talks so far and I'm going to break this up into multiple blog posts across speakers.

There was a much greater emphasis on the biological results than on the algorithmic machinery to produce those results. Perhaps as a biological seminar this shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone but I felt that the emphasis may have been a bit too much on results and less on a demonstration of the accuracy of the methodology and the novelty of the methods used.

That being said the biological implications presented here were very cool if not completely in my area of interest at times and some of the methodology used and things attempted has far reaching implications I believe.

The first speaker was George Church and he talked in broad strokes about the current state of the art in genomics and next gen sequencing. He made the point that I'm sure has been made previously that DNA sequencing technology is increasing at a rate of 10x/year in comparison to moore's law which is a rate of 1.5x/year.

He talked in length about the growth of various -omes that will allow for an increase in understanding of cancer and also made a big big point about how so far every attempt to anonymize biological data has failed and that the answer is not to anonymize but to get the informed consent of the subjects prior to the fact. He pimped his attempt to do this personalgenomes.org which looks very cool.

I'm glad to see some of the really famous people in biology get behind the idea of open science. Walled gardens of data are already hurting scientific advancement and our abilities to build useful tools to analyze the data and create predictive models.