Measuring more is knowing more?

On Friday January 11, 2008, Prof. Frank Holstege delivered his inaugural lecture entitled “Is there more truth in more numbers? On the future of biomedical research.” The Board of Regents at UMC Utrecht appointed Holstege as professor of genomics as of March 15, 2006.

One of the subjects Holstege touched on in his lecture was scale expansion within biomedical research. The use of microarrays now makes it possible to study the entire genome. “Our field is going from data-poor to data-rich. Ten years ago we didn’t know how many genes we had. Now we even know the 3-billion-letter code of all our genetic material. Ten years ago we were glad if we succeeded in measuring the activity of a single gene. Now we can do this for 30,000 genes simultaneously.”