An Epiphany About Computational Biology
I don't hate computational biology, but I've got my issues with the way the field is often practiced. Most of my complaints boil down to this: if a computational biologist is not contributing to our understanding of biology, and not contributing to fundamental computer science either, then what's the point? What are we learning from the research? The problem usually crops up when computational biologists don't seem to care whether their computational results correspond with any biological reality. If a computer model or algorithm is able to (more or less) recapitulate existing data, then that's considered sufficient. But then what is your model contributing? We already knew the existing data, and chances are, your model hasn't contributed anything new to computer science. read more