Petabyte Age Wiredesque lesson on what science can learn from Google

I argued many times here that biology based biotechnology is the next information technology but in order to do so, biotech should harness good IT patterns and mimic its massive computing practices to handle the enormous amount of constantly accumulating data. Often this trend could be summarized in a simple way: keep your eye on Google and conduct thought experiments in advance in which science is done in a Googleplex like environment in terms of the computing & financial resources and algorithm heavy engineering culture. Use Python and learn cluster computing and MapReduce. With the expected launch of the massive scientific dataset hosting Google service – nicknamed Palimpsest – this year finally a direct interface between scientists and Googlers emerges and hopefully opens up possibilities for scientists to cooperate with Google. (Remember my joke on Google BioLabs back in 2006)? I get emails from biologists, bioinformaticians asking me how to be hired by Google ever since then. As I tweeted yesterday: I growingly have the impression that “being ambitious” today = ‘worked, is currently working, is going to work at/for Google’ Taking Google’s inter-industrial power into consideration I see a real chance that some day the “Google of Biotechnology” title goes not to a startup yet to be emerged, not to Genentech or to 23andMe but……to Google itself. No kidding here. Fortunately Google’s model is “to build a killer app then monetize it later” says Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android mobile software in the July issue of Wired so scientists working for the big G probably won’t have to worry about turning their scientific killer app into an instant cash machine.

And now in the very issue of Wired magazine (not online yet ) there is an exciting cover story on the same pattern I talked about concerning the life sciences but in the broader context of every kind of science with the provocative, Fukuyama-like title The End of Science. There is a witty and short essay from editor-in-chief Chris Anderson entitled The End of Theory followed by examples of the ‘new science’ like the The Large Hadron Collider expected to generate 10 petabytes if data/second, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey heaven catalog maker accumulating 25 terrabytes of data so far, the skeleton scanning project of Sharmila Majumdar and the Many Eyes project “where users can share their own dynamic, interactive representations of big data”.

For many people around the globe, Chris Anderson is a freeconomist & the author of a popular airport book but fewer people are aware that he was actually trained as a (quantum) physicist and even worked at Los Alamos (after a 3 min search on Google Scholar and the likes I gave up to find any peer reviewed article Anderson coauthored). So when he writes on science readers should keep in mind that what he really understood once was the practice of physics in the 80’s (looking forward to a biology oriented Wired editor-in-chief in the near 21st century future, Thomas Goetz perhaps?). Anderson talks about the end of traditional science, or at least the end of science according to the most popular philosophical account on how science operates: testable hypothesis for the underlying mechanism, causation – model – test, experiment – confirm/falsify.

“The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses – energies are too high, accelerators too expensive, and so on.”

Anderson concludes:

“There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say” “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”

Interesting point, but isn’t it too early to call all this the End of Science with a typical overjournalistic lingo? From a cultural point of view: it is just not cool to use the vulgar philosophical (and vulgar Hegelian) generalization of a stone conservative philosopher/political theorist who is one of the biggest enemies of everything biotech, specially in the journal famous for its cool technophilia and geekery. /Think about what Fukuyama would say on Venter’s synthetic biology, a biological example used by Anderson in his essay/

On the other hand, Anderson may have right about other sciences he mentions, like psychology, or sociology, and most notably his scientific home, physics but individually conducted, hypothesis based experimental biology is far from being over, or at least that is my very academic experience. Although more & more wet lab biologists find themselves dried out and choose bioinformatics or computational biology instead it is still totally possible to master hypothesis based, carefully designed (good controls!!!), beautiful experiments using less than say 20 main variables with the expected outcome and I see no reason why it should turn out to be the other way.

Even myself (trained and worked as an experimental scientist so far minus 5 year philosophy) have now growing bioinformatics, database building and large-scale pattern seeking dreams, but it’s due to my main commitment – the reason I chose biology once – to robust healthy life extension. One reason scientists are usually switching to computational heavy problem solving in the field of the biomedical sciences is that it is the way to tackle real big, complex issues, like cancer or diabetes or…..aging. But not every scientist would like to solve problems like these.

Anderson is right about the tendencies and trends (yes, science can and must learn a lot from Google, isn’t that obvious?) but even the petabyte age will need and produce Einstein like scientists, brilliant theoreticians, creative thought experimenters, methodological outliers and not just perfect statisticians.

Update: What about the large-scale statistical models? – asks Fernando Pereira via Three-Toed Sloth via Bill Hooker on FriendFeed, where people are mostly underwhelmed by Anderson’s arguments.