5 ms·

I know nothing about life sciences, but from talking to friends it seems like this is one of those no brainer ideas. I'm curious to know what some of the adopt

I know nothing about life sciences, but from talking to friends it seems like this is one of those no brainer ideas. I'm curious to know what some of the adoption/market challenges are - is it hard to get scientists/students to actually use something like this? Why hasn't anyone built this yet? Are there certain technical challenges that haven't yet been addressed? Congrats to a great team!

sajithw 12y ago
It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote though. It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that. It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.
acomjean 12y ago
Its easy to say. I'm 6 months into a stint at a university lab. I write the software that manages the databases for the experiments. There is data eveywhere, managing it isn't easy, especially as it runs into the TB. Still paper notebooks for our researchers. We have a group looking into the digital ones. There is some worry that using a provider means the data is out of your control. These notebooks are almost like legal documents, so they tread lightly when changing the format. Plus worry about lock in and expense.

5 ms·

I know nothing about life sciences, but from talking to friends it seems like this is one of those no brainer ideas. I'm curious to know what some of the adopt

by ernestipark 12y ago

sajithw 12y ago
It is tough - it's a big behavior change to go from paper to electronic records. It's less difficult when scientists are using wikis or Evernote though. It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that. It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.
acomjean 12y ago
Its easy to say. I'm 6 months into a stint at a university lab. I write the software that manages the databases for the experiments. There is data eveywhere, managing it isn't easy, especially as it runs into the TB. Still paper notebooks for our researchers. We have a group looking into the digital ones. There is some worry that using a provider means the data is out of your control. These notebooks are almost like legal documents, so they tread lightly when changing the format. Plus worry about lock in and expense.