How Big Data Is Changing Science

She is, in her own words, an "old-school biologist", brought up on the skills of pipettes and Petri dishes and protective goggles, the science of experiments with glassware on benches – what's known as "wet lab" work. "I knew what a gene looked like on a gel," she says, thinking back to her early career. These days that skill set is not enough. "When I started hiring PhD students 15 years ago, they were entirely wet lab," Corcoran says. "Now when we recruit them, the first thing we look for is if they can cope with complex bioinformatic analysis." To be a biologist, nowadays, you need to be a statistician, or even a programmer. You need to be able to work with algorithms. An algorithm, essentially, is a set of instructions – a series of predefined steps. A recipe could be seen as an algorithm, although a more obvious example is a computer program.