Biomedical research is going big-time: Megaprojects that collect vast stores of data are proliferating rapidly. But scientists' ability to make sense of all that information isn't keeping up.
This conundrum took center stage at a meeting of patient advocates, called Partnering For Cures, in New York City on Nov. 15.
On the one hand, there's an embarrassment of riches, as billions of dollars are spent on these megaprojects.
There's the White House's Cancer Moonshot (which seeks to make 10 years of progress in cancer research over the next five years), the Precision Medicine Initiative (which is trying to recruit a million Americans to glean hints about health and disease from their data), The BRAIN Initiative (to map the neural circuits and understand the mechanics of thought and memory) and the International Human Cell Atlas Initiative (to identify and describe all human cell types).
[For more of this story, written by Richard Harris, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...chers-can-process-it]
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