CULTURE AND RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE 379
tions, funding agencies and organizations would be well served by including in the review process
reviewers with the expertise to identify plausible and well-supported computational hypotheses that
may aid their biological colleagues in reaching a sound and unbiased conclusion about research propos-
als at the BioComp interface.
More generally, these considerations involve changing the value proposition for what research
dollars should support. At an early point in a research field’s development, it certainly makes sense to
emphasize very strongly the creation of basic knowledge. But as a field develops and evolves, it is not
surprising that a need to consolidate knowledge and make it more usable begins to emerge. In the
future, a new balance will have to be struck between the creation of new knowledge and making that
knowledge more valuable to the scientific community.
10.3.5.2 Scale of Supported Work
In times of limited resources (and times of limited resources are always with us), unconventional
proposals are suspect. Unconventional proposals are even more suspect when they require large
amounts of money. No better example can be found than the reactions in many parts of the life sciences
research community to the Human Genome Project when it was first proposed—with a projected price
tag in the billions of dollars, the fear was palpable that the project would drain away a significant
fraction of the resources available for biological research.^79
Work at the BioComp interface, especially in the direction of integrating state-of-the-art computing
and information technology into biological research, may well call for support at levels above those
required for more traditional biology research. For example, a research project with senior expertise in
both biology and computing may well call for support for co-principal investigators. Just as biological
laboratories generally require support for lab technicians, a BioComp project could reasonably call for
programmers and/or system administrators. (A related point is that for a number of years in the recent
past [i.e., during the dot-com boom years] computer scientists commanded relatively high salaries.)
In addition, some areas of modern life sciences research, such as molecular biology, rely on large
grants for the purchase of experimental instruments. The financial needs for instrumentation and labo-
ratory equipment to collect the data necessary for undertake the data-intensive studies of 21st century
biology are significant, and are often at a scale that is unaffordable to all but a small number of academic
institutions. Although large grants are not unheard of in computer science, the across-the-board depen-
dence of important subfields of biology on experiment means that a larger fraction of biological research
is supported through such mechanisms than is true in computer science.
To the extent that proposals for work at the BioComp interface are more costly than traditional
proposals and supported by the same agencies that fund those traditional proposals, it will not be
surprising to find resistance when they are first proposed.
What is the scale of increased cost that might be associated with greater integration of information
technology into the biological research enterprise? If one believes, as does the committee, that informa-
tion technology will be as transformative to biology as it has been to many modern businesses, IT will
affect the way that biological research is undertaken and the discoveries that are made, the infrastruc-
ture necessary to allow the work to be done, and the social structures and organizations necessary to
support the work appropriately.
Similar transformations have occurred in fields such as high finance, transportation, publishing,
manufacturing, and discount retailing. Businesses in these fields tend to invest 5-10 percent of their
gross revenues in information technology,^80 and this is with data that is well structured and under-
stood. It is thus not unreasonable to suggest that a full integration of information technology into the
biological research enterprise might have a comparable cost. Today, there is federal support for only a
very small fraction of that amount.
(^79) See, for example, L. Roberts, “Controversial from the Start,” Science 291(5507):1182-1188, 2001.
(^80) See, for example, http://www.bain.com/bainweb/publications/printer_ready.asp?id=17269.