Bioinformatics industry-a failure in Pakistan!
Natarajan started a discussion on Linkedin that why hasn't the Bioinformatics industry rocketed to success.This stirred up alot of questions that had been at the back of my mind for several months and some utterly new ones with loads of answers. We all kept hearing and seeing the numbers and projections,Somehow it hasn't created or lived upto the buzz and hype it generated a few years ago. One answer could be that there has been no 'explosion' of the businesses that would have been founded in an easier-credit economy? Would one have expected by now, thatthere would have been a lot of (admittedly: inefficiently-redundant) small businesses founded which would ultimately absorb each other into new power houses.No allotted budgets for bioinformaticians.There is another paradox- On one hand you can see plenty of ads for Bioinformatics programmers while on other hand there is indeed a feeling of oversupply
when it comes to trying to sell a bioinformatics product (e.g. Ah! I can have one of the local programmers build it in-house for me, so why should I pay). All the ads for such programmers feed to the hope that there is this industry, while the industry itself is looking for promising revenue generating areas.
when it comes to trying to sell a bioinformatics product (e.g. Ah! I can have one of the local programmers build it in-house for me, so why should I pay). All the ads for such programmers feed to the hope that there is this industry, while the industry itself is looking for promising revenue generating areas.
The summary of the discussion was “Average biologist has become far more computer-savvy than he or she was in 2003. It is now routine for wet labs to maintain Wikis to organize their papers and protocols, and
unexceptional to see an enterprising graduate student or postdoc create a relational database to manage the results from a complex set of experiments.”
“With all these training and online resources available, one would think there would be less need for card-carrying bioinformaticians. Eight years ago, at the height of the bioinformatics bubble,
pharmaceutical companies and other industry players were offering big premiums to
qualified bioinformaticians. "Maybe, one of the reason bioinformatics could not rocket because biology is still struggling to make some valid sense out of the statistics and analysis. There are no well established models and theories in biology that could help understand the data. Theoretical biology lags behind.
I program and chose to do a PhD in Molecular Biology to understand:
1. the mindset of a Biologist that is very different from an informatician,
2. biology itself.
I suppose those who went into "bioinformatics" with a biology background will stay mainly "biologists". Those going into "bioinformatics" from a computer science background, will still mainly be "tool developers", "software engineers", part of "BioIT" (?)
unexceptional to see an enterprising graduate student or postdoc create a relational database to manage the results from a complex set of experiments.”
“With all these training and online resources available, one would think there would be less need for card-carrying bioinformaticians. Eight years ago, at the height of the bioinformatics bubble,
pharmaceutical companies and other industry players were offering big premiums to
qualified bioinformaticians. "Maybe, one of the reason bioinformatics could not rocket because biology is still struggling to make some valid sense out of the statistics and analysis. There are no well established models and theories in biology that could help understand the data. Theoretical biology lags behind.
I program and chose to do a PhD in Molecular Biology to understand:
1. the mindset of a Biologist that is very different from an informatician,
2. biology itself.
I suppose those who went into "bioinformatics" with a biology background will stay mainly "biologists". Those going into "bioinformatics" from a computer science background, will still mainly be "tool developers", "software engineers", part of "BioIT" (?)
This is the cry of those areas and bioinformaticians whom i awed w.r.t the situation of Pakistani bioinformatics industry.Pakistani industry has no formulated policies, no job perspective, nothing to lure people;those already in the field are dishearted. When the leading nations in research are crying;what should Pakistani industry do?
I think carry on sleeping as it has been doing all the years:(
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