- Historical Context
- The Central Dogma
- Challenges and Opportunities
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Challenges and Opportunities
There are hundreds of technical hurdles to be overcome before advances such as designer drugs and cures for genetic diseases can become affordable and as commonplace as over-the-counter drugs. For example, virtually all of the advances in the analysis of genetic diseases require new computer-enabled technologies. Similarly, most molecular biologists concede that sequencing the human genome was a relatively trivial task when compared with the challenges of understanding the human proteome—much less its relationship with bacteria, viruses, and other causes of disease.
Looking beyond the computational hurdles that will inevitably be overcome by the computer science community, there are broader issues and implications related to ethics, morality, religion, privacy, and economics. For example, the high-stakes economic game of biotechnology pits two groups against each other. The first group consists of proponents of custom medicines, genetically modified foods, and cross-species cloning for species conservation and organ creation for transplantation. The second group consists of those who question the bioethics of embryonic stem cell research, the wisdom of creating "frankenfoods" that may permanently alter the ecology of the planet, and the morality of creating clones of pets or even people.
There are legal issues as well. For example, much of the bioinformatics R&D community is at least aware of bitter patent wars, with the realization that whoever has control of the key patents in the field will enjoy a stream of revenues that will likely dwarf those at the height of the dotcom era. Rights to genetic codes (the sequences of base pairs found on strands of DNA) have the potential to both impede academic R&D and to guarantee the commercial success of drug development companies. The resolution of these and related issues depends on public policies and international laws that will define the rights of those who work in the field.
Despite these challenges, bioinformatics has made significant inroads into the technical and social fabric of many nations. For example, China now feeds a significant percentage of its population with genetically modified foods. DNA vaccines promise cures for not only genetic diseases, but also for acquired diseases such as AIDS. In addition, as a result of sequencing the human genome and the genomes of other organisms, scientists have a better understanding of diseases from cystic fibrosis to malaria, and are using this understanding to create new therapies.
Much of bioinformatics is a vast, unknown space. Consider that the typical cell produces hundreds of thousands of proteins, many of which are unknown and of unknown function. What's more, these proteins fold into shapes that are not only a function of the linear sequence of amino acids they contain; the temperature; and the presence of fats, sugars, and water in the microenvironment; but also of other molecules in their immediate proximity. Fully understanding the proteome will require new supercomputer architectures, immensely large databases, new data mining methods, new modeling and simulation techniques, and the networking expertise to integrate data from disparate sources in a way that is both effective and affordable.
As the history of computers and networks has demonstrated, the rate of change in computer-enabled technological innovation is accelerating, and the practical applications of computing to unravel the proteome and other bioinformatics challenges are growing exponentially. In this regard, bioinformatics should be considered by programmers, systems architects, and other computer technology professionals as an opportunity to take a proactive role in defining and shaping not only their future, but the future of humanity as well.