Net prophets

Statements that " we have come to do biology in a new way " or " there is a new paradigm in biological research " are now commonplace. Nobody seems to be satisfied by a single good experiment that gives a precise answer to a well formulated question, which was the old way we did biology. On the contrary there is now a belief that a mass attack on parallel fronts can provide a database of all the information in one concerted effort, and all we need is a computer programme that will give everybody all the knowledge they need. Much of this stems from genome projects, especially the effort to sequence the human genome. However, there are subtle differences between the different cultures that have generated the sequences. The yeast genome was sequenced by a cooperative venture of many small individual scientific groups, who had a deep interest in the result. Surrounding the project was an even larger group of yeast geneticists and molecular biologists who knew how to use the sequence in their experimental work. The sequence was the path to the genes of yeast; there are now ways to access all of the genes directly and the page in the Book of Life devoted to yeast is written in real DNA. The sequence has become the tool for research that it was expected to be, and not a end in itself. It is likely that the genome projects for Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila will have the same impact on their fields, mainly because of the large number of researchers who can immediately make use of the product. It is with the vertebrate genomes that we find a new idea coming to the fore. Roughly speaking, the proponents have come to believe that computers can extract biological significance directly from DNA sequences. This approach has generated two new areas of activity. One, Bioinformatics, is simply pretentious; the other, Functional Genomics, is ridiculous. The latter uses the former to try to find function from the sequences of genes. I don't think that there are any university departments devoted to these subjects but there are certainly a growing number of companies doing one or both. Other areas are now adopting the same approach of systematically assembling data by factory methods. The proteome is emerging from two-dimensional electrophoresis of proteins, but is still a poor relation of the genome. I expect …