Courtsey: forbes.com
In the early 1990s I was living in Boston and reflecting on the relative progress of information technology and the life sciences. It appeared to me then that IT was sputtering a bit; the Internet hadn’t yet transformed commerce, and AI was in one of its winters. Life sciences, on the other hand, seemed to be at the beginning of a boom—at least in Boston and Cambridge. Genomics, personalized medicine, gene editing, and so forth hadn’t fully appeared in life sciences yet, but they were on the horizon. So I toyed with the idea that I should abandon my research, teaching, and consulting on IT to focus on life sciences. Not that I have the biochemical expertise to make fundamental contributions to that field, but I could at least focus on the business strategy and organizational effectiveness issues in the life sciences industry.
That would have been a big mistake on my part. To be sure, the life sciences have taken off in a big way. If you’ve visited Kendall Square in Cambridge recently you will know what a biotech boomtown it has become. But almost every person I meet in the biotech companies in the region have the term “informatics” in their title. IT has become a dominant force in almost every type of innovation. In fact, during a recent visit to Kendall Square for the 2019 Emtech MIT conference, I was confirmed in my belief that information technology, big data, and AI are powering developments in almost every area of science and technology.
The specific provocation for this observation was the “2019 35 Innovators Under 35” awards, which are announced annually by MIT Technology Review (which puts on the Emtech conferences). 31 of the 35 young innovators were present at the conference, and each one gave a short talk. The particular science or technology domains of the young innovators were quite varied, ranging from measuring moisture levels in harvested grain to mapping the human brain. Some, of course, worked in information technology fields like artificial intelligence. But I was struck that almost every one of these innovators used information technology to help achieve their goals.
