Courtesy of James R. Brown
The renowned Canadian literary scholar, Northrop Frye, once wrote: "The more trustworthy the evidence, the more misleading it is."1 Although he was not referring to the biotechnology revolution, to my mind it is an apt caveat for the contemporary challenges facing the field of bioinformatics in drug discovery. We are becoming awash in new "evidence" (substitute "data") revealing in great depth the intricacies of cellular life, but are we properly using these data to find new medicines?
The evidence in the life sciences is becoming highly trustworthy as well as expansive. Genomes from a variety of species are being sequenced at a breathtaking rate. DNA polymorphisms are being widely determined for human populations according to geography, disease disposition, and other traits. We now have exquisite tools including DNA microarrays, RNA interference technology, and soon, protein expression arrays, for probing the internal workings of a cell ...
