I was talking to a friend over the weekend…he’s a computer scientist/engineer who moved into biology about three years ago. He’s doing bioinformatics work for a major academic research institute in Cambridge. He told me how frustrated he sometimes feel with biologists: their “slow” pace of bench work, their obsessiveness with repeating experiments, in generally their tendency to (seemingly) solve the same problems over and over again, and the sheer amount of uncertainty and ‘fiddling’ that’s inherent in experimental biology (I got a sense for that during my 10 day fellowship in a molecular bio lab).

This frustration is understandable from an engineer’s point of view, especially someone with experience in the software industry, where turnaround is a lot faster and problems and solutions are perhaps more clearly delineated.

Now that informatics is becoming so important in biology, how much of a problem is this culture clash? How do researchers find a way to bridge the gap? Or do the they just throw their hands up?