A contrary view to this trend was forcibly expressed by the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Sydney Brenner, whom I quoted in chapter 3 and who was coincidentally director of the famous institute in Cambridge founded by Max Perutz that I mentioned earlier: “Biological research is in crisis. . . . Technology gives us the tools to analyse organisms at all scales, but we are drowning in a sea of data and thirsting for some theoretical framework with which to understand it.
There it is, we are not gaining greater understanding at a rapid clip, just gathereing an incredible amount of mostly uncorrelated data.
