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10.3.3.6 Funding Risk
Tight funding environments often engender in researchers a tendency to behave conservatively and
to avoid risk. That is, unless special care is taken to encourage them in other directions (e.g., through
special programs in the desired areas), researchers seeking funding are likely to pursue avenues of
intellectual inquiry that are likely to succeed. Such researchers are therefore strongly motivated to
pursue work that differs only marginally from previous successful work, where paths to success can
largely be seen even before the actual research is undertaken. These pressures are likely to be exacer-
bated for senior researchers with successful and well-respected groups and hence many mouths to feed.
This point is addressed further in Section 10.3.5.3.
10.3.3.7 Local Cyberinfrastructure
Section 7.1 addressed the importance of cyberinfrastructure to the biological research enterprise
taken as a whole. But individual research laboratories need to be able to count on the local counterpart
of community-wide cyberinfrastructure. Institutions generally provide electricity, water, and library
services as part of the infrastructure that serves individual resident laboratories. But information and
information technology services are increasingly as important to biological research as these more
traditional services, and thus it makes sense to consider that they might be provided as a part of the
local infrastructure.
On the other hand, regarding computing and information services as part of local infrastructure has
institutional implications. For example, one important issue is providing centralized support for decen-
tralized computing. Useful scientific computing must be connected to a network, and networks must
interact and must be run centrally, but nonetheless, scientific computing must be accomplished in the
way scientific instruments are used, that is, very much under the control of the researcher. How can
institutions develop a computing infrastructure that delivers the cost effectiveness and the robustness
and the reliability of well-run centralized systems while at the same time delivering the flexibility
necessary to support innovative scientific use? In many research institutions, managers of centralized
computing regard researchers as cowboys uninterested in exercising any discipline for the larger good,
while researchers regard the managers of centralized computing as bureaucrats who are disinterested
in the practice of science. Though neither of these caricatures is correct, these divergent views of how
computing should effectively be deployed in a research organization will continue to exist unless the
institution takes steps to reconcile them.
10.3.4 Barriers in Commerce and Business10.3.4.1 Importance Assigned to Short-term Payoffs
In a time frame roughly coincident with the dot-com boom, commercial interest in bioinformatics
was very high—perhaps euphoric in retrospect. Large, established, biotech-pharmaceutical companies,
genomics-era drug discovery companies, and tiny start-ups all believed in the potential for
bioinformatics to revolutionize drug design and even health care, and these beliefs were mirrored in
very high stock prices.
More recently, market valuations of biotech firms have dropped along with the rest of the technol-
ogy sector, and these more recent negative trends have affected the prevailing sentiment about the
value of bioinformatics for drug design, at least for the short term. Although the human genome
sequencing is complete, only a handful of drugs now in the pipeline stemmed from bioinformatic
analysis of the genome. Bioinformatics does not automatically lead to marketable “blockbuster” drugs,
and drug companies have realized that the primary bottlenecks involve biological knowledge: not
enough is known of the overall biological context of gene expression and gene pathways. In the words