I'm a doc, teaching myself python specifically because it's painfully obvious that we (docs) need more and more programming skill to do real medical research. M

I'm a doc, teaching myself python specifically because it's painfully obvious that we (docs) need more and more programming skill to do real medical research. My current project is shaping up to be a multi-year effort to hunt cancer (tissue micro-arrays to assess novel antigens). So this article threw me for a loop in the first sentence. The article is still relevant though, in my mind. There's no external motivation to write a parser. But how else could one reasonably build a research database? I suppose someone could manually go through the clinical database and transfer info into a research database for 500 patients. But what about the next 10 studies of 500 patients? It seems unimportant in the near term, but in the long-term having someone on the project who can talk to the computer is going to make or break it.