Cuts on the future

It's a great and difficult time for science.

Let me explain: we find ourself in an age, where the simplistic but powerful approaches of basic biological research are approached with the tools of massive computer power. We like to sell this as system biology.

System biology is the reaching out for the basic mechanisms of life, looking for patterns that are repeated throughout the genome (in the case of genomics, can be also proteom or metabolom).

These approaches are often expensive, and only clusters of research group can afford huge experiments (we can for example mention the ENCODE project).

Now we are facing cuts in the US.

This could stop for a moment a trend that was revolutionizing biology, and thus our understanding on how life, but also disease, works.

The knowledge is not lost of course. But knowledge that we can not acquire today, because of missing funds, creates a gap. This gap could be the cause of some deaths in ten years. Deaths that could be prevented. It could be you.

We are in strange days indeed. Biology is revolutionized again, but we can not afford to keep the pace with it.

A start

I started already some blogs, but this would be the first in english and about science. It is thought mainly as a writing exercise, as the completion of my master thesis was a hard task. In four years I want to be ready for my PhD thesis :)

As a topic I would like to choose gene regulation (hence the name "geneswitch"). It's my idea to write down thoughts about papers that I read and seminars that I attended, and life in science in general.

Let's see if I will be able to put together the effort to transform this empty space in something useful to me and the hypothetical readers.