death knell

The Buzz: Is Big Science the Death Knell for Small Labs?

User Image amillikan | January 16, 2009
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."