[ippisl]

Thanks for a very detailed and interesting description of the scientific process.

From the way you describe it, it seems that doing science in your area, is not the science that would attract small hacker groups , because it's long and boring.

hackers tend to contribute to the interesting parts of open source , i.e. languages like python and ruby, and organizations tend to do the big, boring heavy lifting, things like android , linux , etc.

By the way, what about technologies like combinatorial testing, automation , and miniturization ? what would be their affect on the way biology is done ?

[Goladus]

I wouldn't say it's boring. Not everyone has the patience science requires but for those that do, there's plenty of incentive to do disciplined data collection.

It's most likely just that the resources required to do it are still out of reach, unlike the python and ruby communities where your biggest expenses are a computer with a text editor and access to an internet connection.

Even some computing resources are out of reach for individuals, even if just barely. Amazon hosts public datasets, which is nice, but but the 500,000 instance-hours of HPC compute time needed to do analysis is not going to be in the budget of a hacker-in-the-basement (ie someone with no funding, whether it be from grants, revenue, or investment).