A delightfully cantankerous Mike Yaffe writing for Science Signaling:
"We biomedical scientists are addicted to data, like alcoholics are addicted to cheap booze. As in the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for his lost wallet, biomedical scientists tend to look under the sequencing lamppost where the “light is brightest”—that is, where the most data can be obtained as quickly as possible. Like data junkies, we continue to look to genome sequencing when the really clinically useful information may lie someplace else."
Scientists are not just "addicted" to data. They literally need it.
It is impossible to act empirically without data — and obtaining good quality data is the core objective for every scientist. Ideas are cheap and in a scientific utopia we would have the resources to study them all. Unfortunately — tethered to reality as we are — a pragmatic filter must be applied to all testable theories. Feasible ideas (might) get funded, whilst theoretically sound, but technically challenging ones often remain untested.
DNA sequencing represents the former. It's a mature field where technical advances strive for increased speed, improved-fidelity and reduced cost — not changes in the data output. A sequenced genome is a sequenced genome. It can be expensive and time-consuming, but sequencing a genome is exceptionally feasible. In contrast consider protein sequencing: Existing technology is extremely expensive, frustratingly stochastic and years away from true proteome-wide coverage. However, whilst quantitative proteome sequencing may be more challenging than genomic sequencing, proteomic results have the potential to be far more valuable. So, although, as a person working in proteomics, I envy the pragmatic simplicity of DNA sequencing; I have less envy for the dreary results of large DNA sequencing projects.
Yaffe shares my boredom with genomics and laments the continued funding of pragmatically feasible (although still very expensive) efforts to sequence the DNA of cancer genomes:
"So far, the results have been pretty disappointing. Various studies on common human tumors, many under the auspices of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), have demonstrated that essentially all, or nearly all, of the mutated genes and key pathways that are altered in cancer were already known."
Of course that doesn't mean they shouldn't have looked. Knowing something is similar to how you think it is still has value. The continued funding of such projects is substantially less exciting and Yaffe makes a great case for why our "drunk scientist" should leave this "lamppost" and look for their keys in a more sensible place.