Bio & Web - IT: Growth and Prospects

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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