[akulesa]

I agree with you that its essential to lower the amount of time and cost that experiments take, and find needles to replace our sledgehammers. I work in technology/methods development, so I'm happy that I should a job for the next decade! However, I have to disagree with the claim at the end of your response: once we get the methods right, we can start building biology into a predictive and quantitative science.

I think the debate needs to start at, what does it mean to make biology into a predictive and quantitative science? Sure, once that flood of data comes in (and I'd argue its already here), we can build huge dictionaries of perturbations-responses in every system we study. And sure, this will be extremely useful for drug development, synthetic biology, et cetera. But is it "understanding"? Is it intellectually satisfying?

Right now it's unclear to me how to even evaluate where are our current understanding of biological systems are incomplete <b> in ways that matter </b>. Sure, in any system there are remaining things to be discovered, but maybe they are 2nd order, 3rd order, 10th order effects on the behavior of the system. The way people are incentivized though, they will do all they can to convince you that the 3rd order effect they study is really just as important as the 1st order, and it often takes more effort than is worth it to see through the smoke screens.

Developing more methods and technology further fractionates the field more than it serves to unify it (with the exception numbering what I can count on my hands). Until we have any idea where we're going, it's futile to just wait for more data to come in.