Bioinformatics is a merger of computer science with engineering principles to solve biological problems. I think it should be in engineering domain but in Pakistan it is under IT. Please give your opinions
Engineers have specific degrees and certification processes in most, but not all countries. What this legal framework entails for you will depend on where you live.
Where there are regulations, engineers often accept civil and/or criminal liability when their products hurt or kill people. They put their stamp on their work to stake their identity on the safety of their design.
Bioinformaticians wear many hats and are programmers, often, or data scientists, but I would not call them engineers in the common and legal senses of the word.
There are virtually no assurances of legal or even reputational liability when you use an open source bioinformatics package, for instance.
You might be a bioengineer at a drug company that designs and manufactures a medication, stating its efficacy based on the calculations that come out of out of one or another bioinformatics or statistics tool, and that drug may end up sickening or killing patients. There is virtually no way to hold the developer(s) of that software to account for that outcome; it is contingent on you to assure regulators of the safety of your product.
I found these opinion pieces addressing the question of "What have the principles of engineering taught us about biological systems" tangentially related and quite an interesting read.
Bioinformatics is about information as the name aptly states (even though originally that was not the intent).
Initially, "informatics" meant the use of information technology (computers) to process data of biological significance. But the more we know about how the cell operates the more we understand that it is the information encoding and information processing of the cell that we measure with bioinformatic techniques. We are in the science of information interpretation first and foremost.
A cell is not a like a clock, a cell is not like a transistor, a cell is not like an engine. All of these examples are engineering products - the cell is radically different from each. So how could bioinformatics be engineering? I might even venture to say that bioinformatics is the "opposite" of engineering.
It branches into many areas but Istvan's answer is more or less in line with my own idea about it. Take a look at my slides here, which I gave to school children on a school open day in Sheffield UK: A: What Is Bioinformatics?
By the way, it should not matter how one sees it... It is information technology, it is statistics, it is biology, it is software engineering, it is programming.
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If anything it should be under (systems) biology. Key in bioinformatics is still biology, all the rest are just means to solve a biological problem.
traditional biology is descriptive, sentence driven, enumerative, dare I say "mechanistic" - this thing does this, that thing does that, but what if different combinations of "things" can give you the same "that"? There is no way to capture, model or understand those phenomena.
in my opinion, traditional biology is not well suited for representing the complexity of information processing inside the cell - hence a conundrum
agreed and that's also why I added " (systems) "
Though I personally prefer to see it as an increase in biological knowledge, in the sense that we are now at a point (and even past that actually) where we figured out that the 'traditional' look on biology is (in most cases) not holding true anymore or at best is way to simplistic.
What is the point of this question?
It’s all of the above, depending on your particular ‘flavour of bioinformatics’.