Had the chance to sneak on to a Life-Sciences trip to the Mouse Genome Centre today. A fascinating trip – although I didn't follow two of the six or seven brief lectures we had (hell, I'm no biologist!)
However, the most interesting bit (for me) was the lab-tour; to see the microarray gene-expression equipment, and related software.
The software sucked (or, so it seemed to me!): and it made me wonder if the demand for this amazing technology is low(ish), simply because it takes so long to get trusted results (wot with all the manual tweaking required)
I have no idea how old their software was (although, 'not much' I'll wager), but, boy – you know, we could do a lot better – and if I weren't so busy on my own research (or in expending the necessary energy on the effort required to avoid doing it), well, I'd love to tackle the problem.