In the emergent era of Big Science, will the work of small-scale genetics labs be overwhelmed—or worse, rendered obsolete—by massive genome studies like the International HapMap Project? Dan MacArthur of Genetic Future thinks that a happy equilibrium could be reached between the two approaches. "Big Genetics generates far more data than its participants can ever hope to analyse themselves," he writes, "and the hefty remainder is fodder for a plethora of small labs exploring small but important facets of the bigger picture."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Over at Gene Expression, p-ter has a post up defending the "big genetics" approach, noting that large-scale hypothesis-free genetics studies have consistently yielded important results for follow-up detailed fine-scale studies.
It's a sound argument. I've argued in the past that many of the fears…
[Added in edit in response to concerned emails: The original title was deliberately provocative, and contrary to the message in the text; I apologise for any misunderstanding. I've largely rewritten the post to make my point more clearly.]
One of the curious and paradoxical effects of Big Genetics…
Olivia Judson's blog has a guest post by Aaron Hirsh that got me thinking about a topic that will be familiar to most scientists: the transition of research towards Big Science. Big Science basically includes any project involving a large consortium of research groups working together on a tightly…
The successes of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in identifying genetic risk factors for common diseases have been heavily publicised in the mainstream media - barely a week goes by these days that we don't hear about another genome scan that has identified new risk genes for diabetes, lupus…
That is so true.