The Hum and the Genome

Minds Must UniteIt's time for experimentalists to stop ignoring computational modelers(David L. Donoho, David Mumford, and Bruno A. Olshausen)

Making Biological Computing SmarterTools for thought in the age of biological knowledge(Nina Fedoroff, Steve Racunas, and Jeff Shrager)

The air at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, near Cambridge, fairly hums with electricity. At the end of a long corridor, on the other side of a set of double doors in what's known as J-block lies the Institute's data center, the brains of a vast bioinformatics operation. Within, a loud voice and a careful tread are useful – one to be heard above the drone of the machines, the other to avoid the streams of cold air that billow up from vents in the floor.

The drone wasn't quite so loud when Sanger opened 12 years ago with 15 staff members. Then, the institute's computing hardware fit into a couple ...