“How do people like you ever get last-author papers?” The person who asked me this question in 2008 during the interview for my current job was (and still is) a well-known stem cell biologist with decades of experience in science. But she still didn’t really know what to think of ‘people like me‘: bioinformaticians and computational biologists. Aren’t bioinformaticians just service providers? Handy to have, but without any real scientific vision and contribution? She clearly worried about my ability to do independent research.
And she wasn’t alone. A couple of years later I interviewed for an EMBO fellowship, which I didn’t get because the panel –mostly cell biologists, no one computational or from genomics or medicine– thought my group was a “mathematical service unit” and my research was “overly driven by my collaborators”. I’m still not sure what a ‘mathematical service unit’ could be (proofing theorems on demand maybe?) but their comments showed me how far removed their research practice was from my own.
Even though bioinformatics is by now an established field these personal experiences show that ‘old school’ biologists, who form the scientific establishment and direct mainstream research, are still very uncomfortable with ‘people like me’ who were trained in other disciplines, pursue biological questions different from their own, and use approaches not covered in classical biological training.
Hallam Steven’s book Life Out Of Sequence, A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics starts with the tension between old and new biology that ‘people like me’ experience every day and describes the way biology has been and is being changed by computational methods.
