You may be wondering about the title of this blog.
Early in my bioinformatics career, I gave a talk to my department. It was fairly basic stuff – how to identify genes in a genome sequence, standalone BLAST, annotation, data munging with Perl and so on. Come question time, a member of the audience raised her hand and said:
“It strikes me that what you’re doing is rather desperate. Wouldn’t you be better off doing some experiments?”
It was one of the few times in my life when my jaw literally dropped and swung uselessly on its hinges. Perhaps I should have realised there and then that I was in the wrong department and made a run for it. Instead, I persisted for years, surrounded by people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t “get it”.
Ultimately though, her breathtakingly-stupid question did make a great blog title.
