Bioinformatics: the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated
Lincoln Stein updates his 2003 prediction that bioinformatics would be dead in ten years:
In February 2003 I gave a keynote address for the second annual O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called 'Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012' in which I predicted that bioinformatics as a discipline separate from mainstream biology would be gone in ten years. My talk was met with resentment, disappointment and stunned disbelief by an audience of computer geeks who had come to the conference for the express purpose of getting in on the hot new thing. Worse, this was the year in which biotech and pharma realized they had significantly overinvested in bioinformatics and started large-scale layoffs. In the light of a downsized bioinformatics market, the O'Reilly publishing house cancelled a series of planned bioinformatics textbooks, and never sponsored another Bioinformatics Technology Conference. It seemed as though my predictions had come true ten years early, and although I knew it was all coincidental, I couldn't suppress the sinking feeling that I was the villain who triggered the collapse.