Bio & Web - IT: Growth and Prospects

Here are two graphs which are showing the growth of BioIT over all.
Out of curiosity I gave the terms

1. Bioinformatics
2. systems biology
3. genomics
4. proteomics

for in

• Google scholar: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
• Pubmed : PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 19 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

with year on year accumulation, to see how the growth is.

Interestingly and as expected, its growing.

There are couple of interesting observations:

Consider google scholar gives articles published in journals + web based articles and notes hence google scholar gives at least 5 times more hits than pubmed.

Pubmed gives the articles getting published in ~3000 odd scientific journals.

I have no clue why there is dip in 2004 for the key word bioinformatics and a sudden surge for the key word genomics in Scholar search. But you can see a consistent growth for all keywords in pubmed search. It might the time when Bioinformatics was further divided into different disciplines calling them genomics, systems biology, proteomics etc. etc.

The other interesting point is to see that systems biology term started appearing in publication only since 2003 onwards. But the keyword was in use in web articles and in day to day usage since 1997 -98. hmmm..quite interesting for me.

So, students!! BioIT is here to stay. Enjoy Life. Be Happy.

Dear Students/Teachers/Parents

The Objective:
A Scientist's Perspective of why BioIT Struggling. A failure due to too much branding before maturing. A genuine case showing Half Knowledge is catastrophic

The Audience:
This note is in context to those Indian Middle class parents, teachers and students who invested and lost lakhs of rupees to get their ward trained in bioinformatics with a dream of making great money in a very less span of time for a comfortable living as happened in IT Domain.

IT is a technology, NOT BioIT yet: When science matures, its applications lead us to technologies which would appreciate us to a ‘better’ standard of living. Science is a path of observations, systematization and standardization of a subset of Absolute knowledge. The applications emerging out of that science is technology.

BioIT is NOT IT: Come out of this Illusion. Bioinformatics / Computational Biology / BioIT (which I will be interchangeably use in this essay) is emerging science and NOT Technology. Bioinformatics as a science is yet to be stabilized, systematized and standardized. At least one should have realized it now that it is lack of this clarity that resulted in the closure of many bioinformatics companies world wide which went ahead with large investments after the release of 1st sequence draft of human genome in 2000-2001. None of the companies ever realized their revenue projections.

BioIT is NOT dot com business: BioIT will NOT generate revenues at the pace seen by IT business. IT is a technology emerged out of the digital science revolution. At this instant of time, BioIT is research and development oriented since still we do not know all the biological parameters and the associated rules. Further, we still do not know implications of how to play with the infinitesimally known parameters and especially on a computer. Hence, MIND INTENSIVE and RISKY.

Then the question of: Where’s the Opportunity?

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