The fact that you can do your PHD without being aware where real innovation is happening is a good illustration of the poor state of academic biology.
I don’t think there are easy solutions for fixing academic biology, but it’s an important problem. The key is to step up a meta level. It might be harder to get grants to work on that level but the possible gain is much higher.
In some sense the biosafety issues are also up one meta level.
The replicability of papers is significantly hindered by lack of automation, to my mind.
I think the Cloud approach is here really great. In a laboratory you can do things implicitly. In a cloud experiment you have to specify everything explicitly.
Emerald Cloudlab allows free hosting of all the experimental data if a researcher makes the data publically available.
Thank you, I’d never heard of Emerald Cloudlab. I guess I was speaking too much from my own observations and without enough research.
The fact that you can do your PHD without being aware where real innovation is happening is a good illustration of the poor state of academic biology.
I don’t think there are easy solutions for fixing academic biology, but it’s an important problem. The key is to step up a meta level. It might be harder to get grants to work on that level but the possible gain is much higher. In some sense the biosafety issues are also up one meta level.
I think the Cloud approach is here really great. In a laboratory you can do things implicitly. In a cloud experiment you have to specify everything explicitly. Emerald Cloudlab allows free hosting of all the experimental data if a researcher makes the data publically available.