“We biomedical scientists are addicted to data, like alcoholics are addicted to cheap booze,” Michael Yaffe, a cancer biologist from MIT, wrote in the journal Science Signaling. “As in the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for his lost wallet, biomedical scientists tend to look under the sequencing lamppost where the ‘light is brightest’ [because that’s where it’s easiest to see]—that is, where the most data can be obtained as quickly as possible. Like data junkies, we continue to look to genome sequencing when the really clinically useful information may lie someplace else.”
