Forum:Opinion: Bioinformatician - What comes first? Biology vs Informatics.

Question

[st.ph.n]

A computer scientist can manipulate any file type commonly seen in bioinformatics, but may not understand what the underlying biological questions are. A biologist can ask the questions, but as we see on a daily basis here on Biostars, may not have the training to run or debug a program raising an error, leaving little to go on to provide support. So, what is more important for a Bioinformatician? In my personal experience, it is a hybrid of the two, as the name implies. We build tools to analyze, sort, and report data ranging from simple tests to complex statistical analyses. However, we shouldn't be just technicians for bench scientists, often to whom we must relay results from a biological context, and not the technical aspects within a piece of code. Alternatively, to my experience, I've met many bioinformaticians who do not have a biology background, who focus more on the computer science. This post is intended to discuss the opinions of Biostars users in regards to the importance of biology vs informatics, for a Bioinformatician.

[GenoMax]

As you already said:

In my personal experience, it is a hybrid of the two, as the name implies.

It could vary from day to day. Specially if you do this as a "service" (either for a fee or via some other support mechanism).

Answer 1

[WouterDeCoster]

In my opinion, the first 90 percent of bioinformatics is biology and the remaining 90% is informatics.

[GenoMax]

Superman @Wouter willing/able to give 180% :)

[WouterDeCoster]

Shameless plagiarism

[Joe]

https://goo.gl/J1eiBc

[GenoMax]

If this is an image then put it up on imgur and link directly.

[Joe]

It's a direct link to a GIF, just not on imgur

[GenoMax]

URL shortners are scary since you don't have an idea what you are clicking on. You may want to post a direct link in that case.

[Joe]

Yeah I did think about that, but I didn't want to ruin the surprise :P

Answer 2

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

Computers are just tools that we use to answer biological questions. Eventually every biologist will be able to use a computer to run some basic tasks (and by this I mean writing scripts, not clicking on a button). Specialist biologists aka bioinformaticians/computer biologists will take care of some more specialized or complicated aspects. It is already heading in this direction around me. So in short, bioinformaticians are specialist biologists just like biochemists. How their skills are employed just depends on the context/environment they are in.

[st.ph.n]

Specialist biologist - I like it.

Answer 3

[Emily]

Only the biologist can ask the question. The informatician provides the tools to answer it but only the biologist can ask it. So the biologist comes first.

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

It really depends on the context and on how you define bioinformatician. While it is true that bioinformaticians in service positions usually can't set the overall agenda of a project, there are also nuances. In collaborative projects, the leading scientist can be a bioinformatician or a bioinformatician on the team can be responsible for parts of the project and ask the questions related to this part. Also, where do you put bioinformatician PIs ? I wouldn't say that the research groups at the EBI are only there to develop tools to answer other people's questions. So if only biologists can ask questions then all those bioinformatician PIs are biologists. Hence my conclusion that bioinformaticians are biologists which specialized in computational approaches just like other biologists specialize in other areas.

[Emily]

A bioinformatician is both the biologist and the informatician. When they ask the question they put their biologist hat on, when they answer it they wear the informatician hat. If the question being asked her is which hat you wear first, then it's the biologist hat.

[i.sudbery]

The corollary to this is that if you are a informatician first, you'll struggle not to spend all your time answering other peoples requests rather than guiding your own work.