suter2@urz.unibas.ch (clemens suter-crazzolara) (04/03/91)
dear paul and steve, you have been giving away some thoughts wether biologists should get to know their computer. the main question that occurs to me is: if i have a protein, and i need to get the sequence, i tend to leave the sequencing to a specialist, rather then to get involved in the chemistry myself. this is true for a lot of different methods related to biology (overexpression, even production, cell- culture, somitimes even actual cloning). we tend to give a lot of jobs away. now, if i had to go to courses on all these subjects, including computing, and had to get involved in each region of interest, there wouldn`t be much time left for experiments. what i want to bring across is the general idea that we shouldn`t expect everybody to get to deeply involved in computing (as we also shouldn`t when it comes to protein sequencing). if you like working with a computer, fine, but if your not a wizard, there should be nothing against that either.