Science today has rapidly moved into unpredictable and unprecedented achievements, with increasingly faster advances in many different fields. In the last two decades, the advent of high-throughput technologies, with special emphasis on omics, has produced a massive amount of data that have soon required the establishment of novel approaches, mathematic algorithms, or even new disciplines, notably bioinformatics. Historically, both empirical and deductive (hypothesis-driven, mechanistic) approaches have contributed to the advancement of all scientific disciplines. Nowadays, however, the former approach seems to prevail, due to these powerful, sophisticated technologies that are available.
This frantically growing body of knowledge, based on more and more specific data, has eventually led to the proliferation of what I call the scientists of what, who are merely interested in obtaining highly selective information on a series of biological phenomena. The scientific context, wherein these researchers operate, is almost entirely addressed to personalized medicine and dominated by ...
