The complexity and variability of aging itself, along with the fragmented nature of researchers’ current understanding of aging, call for tools that can help scientists dig through mounds of data to find often subtle connections.
Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France rode a bicycle until she was 100 years old. When she gave up smoking at age 117, her doctor suspected it was out of pride. (She couldn’t see well enough...
Apr, 01, 2008
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
Collaborations are a fact of life for interdisciplinary fields like biomedical computing, and social scientists can help researchers understand how to make them more productive
Social scientists who study science have noticed a trend: More and more researchers are collaborating. Over the last twenty years, the number of co-authored papers has increased in every scientific...
Jul, 01, 2008
Pursuing the frontiers of systems biology in an interdisciplinary, non-academic enviroment
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) was founded in Seattle, Washington in 2000 by Leroy Hood, MD, PhD, Alan Aderem, PhD, and Reudi Aebersold, PhD. Five years later, they are pursuing the...
Apr, 01, 2006
MICCAI 2007, the 10th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention.
What: MICCAI typically attracts over 600 world leading scientists, engineers and...
Oct, 01, 2007
Many systems models are strikingly vulnerable to even small changes in the variables
Systems biologists seek to model many complex biological interactions all at once. Typically, they input tens or even hundreds of variables to produce predic- tions about a system—for example,...
Jan, 01, 2008
Can the complexities of biology be boiled down to Amazon.com-style recommendations? The examples here suggest possible pathways to an intelligent healthcare system with big data at its core.
“We have recommendations for you,” announces the website Amazon.com each time a customer signs in.
This mega-retailer analyzes billions of customers’ purchases—nearly $...
Jan, 02, 2012
How increased coverage of the structure space is transforming the field of biology
When the human genome was completely sequenced in 2003, researchers were already pondering how biomedicine could make use of it. One hope was that the sequences would lead to a greater...
Jan, 01, 2010
Transparent peer review, replication studies, and journals of negative results all suggest change is on the horizon
As I was writing this editorial, I learned about yet another scientific paper being retracted. This time it was a genetics paper in Science, one of the hundreds of retractions that the blog...
Sep, 01, 2011
POINT/
NO: Grant applications for the development and maintenance of software and infrastructure should compete with basic research applications.
Biomedicine has a strong...
Jul, 01, 2009