Data centers are the new oil refineries, argues The Economist. Where black sludge and steam once marked the beating heart of the economy, now blinking servers laced with fiber optic cables indicate where the action is.
Biotechnology — like all other industries — must adapt. Synthetic biology teams that embrace modern tools like cloud computing, professionally built software, and laboratory automation will save time, reduce errors, streamline complex workflows, and maintain their agility in the digital economy. Those who fail to adopt new tools will be primed for disruption.
Software is already an integral part of biological research, but most scientific apps lag far behind the rest of the digital frontier. As the software giant Autodesk puts it: