That’s what some experts say:
Despite the need for new analytical tools, a number of biologists said that the computational infrastructure continues to be underfunded. “Often in biology, a lot of money goes into generating data but a much smaller amount goes to analyzing it,” said Nathan Price, associate director of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. While physicists have free access to university-sponsored supercomputers, most biologists don’t have the right training to use them. Even if they did, the existing computers aren’t optimized for biological problems. “Very frequently, national-scale supercomputers, especially those set up for physics workflows, are not useful for life sciences,” said Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute involved in both the Earth Microbiome Project and the Human Microbiome Project. “Increased funding for infrastructure would be a huge benefit to the field.”