• Question: what do you code in science

    Asked by 273genm39 to David on 9 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: David Howard

      David Howard answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      The data we have now is enormous. I recently analysed the genetic data on 500,000 people and this wouldn’t be possible without coding. Coding allows you to extract the important information you need and convert it into the format you need. Then coding allows you to set up the analysis which tells you whether a gene is involved in a disease. And finally then to pull all your results together you need to write another bit of code.
      However, there are also other scientists, who might work in the lab, that don’t need to know how to code.

Comments

  • Photo: Gemma

    Gemma commented on :

    We are even teaching healthcare professionals to code a bit on the Masters programme in Genomic Medicine that I help run in Cambridge – we teach them a bit of R.
    People generally need to code to analyse genomic data because, as David says, the amount of data is huge. People who do a lot of coding for biological applications are called bioinformaticians, but a lot of scientists do a bit of coding so that they can analyse their own data rather than having to rely on someone else. There is a lot of demand for people who both understand biology and can code, so much so that there is a new apprenticeship in bioinformatics starting up this autumn: https://www.anglia.ac.uk/study/degree-apprenticeships/employers/our-courses/bioinformatics-employer-information