[Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research?

[PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ]

Dear Alberto,

Many thanks for the kickoff text. I will try to produce a couple of direct 
comments.
You have reminded me of the early 70's, when I first approached science. A 
few computers had made their entrance in the university halls. During those 
years, and for some decades to come, a new mantra was to be ensconced: 
modeling, simulations. Thanks to computers, we had a fascinating new tool; a 
mathematical machine that was opening a new window to the world of science, 
equivalent to the telescope or the microscope in the scientific revolution. 
Now, almost 50 years later, after having provoked their own "information 
revolution" it seems that computers are more than a new tool. Dataism 
coupled with artificial intelligence, deep learning and the other 
techniques, have taken them to the command post, so that they are becoming 
direct "agents" of the scientific progress. And this is strange.
They have already defeated masters of chess, of go and of other contests... 
are they going to defeat scientists too? Are they the "necessary" new lords 
of all quarters of techno-social complexity?
You have depicted very cogently the new panorama of biomedical research, 
probably the mainstream, and I wonder whether this is the most interesting 
direction of advancement. In some sense, yes (or no!), as it is where big 
biomed companies, technological firms, and management establishment are 
pointing at. It is easy to complain that they are leaving aside the 
integrative vision, the meaningful synthesis that facilitate our 
comprehension, the "soul" in the machine... But we have been complaining in 
this way at least during the last two decades. So I really do not know. 
Fashions in science come and go: maybe all of this is a temporary illusion. 
Or a taste of the science of the future.
In any

case, it was nice hearing from a biomedical researcher in the wet lab.
Best wishes--Pedro

On Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:23:01 +0100 "Alberto J. Schuhmacher"  wrote:
>Dear FIS Colleagues,
>I very much appreciate this opportunity to discuss with all of you.
>My mentors and science teachers taught me that Science had a method, rules and procedures that should be followed and pursued rigorously and with perseverance. The scientific research needed to be preceded by one or several hypotheses that should be subjected to validation or refutation through experiments designed and carried out in a laboratory. The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". Experiments are a
procedure designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of 
the scientific method.
>In our case, molecular, personalized and precision medicine aims to anticipate the future development of diseases in a specific individual through molecular markers registered in the genome, variome, metagenome, metabolome or in any of the multiple "omes" that make up the present "omics" language of current Biology.
>The possibilities of applying these methodologies to the prevention and treatment of diseases have increased exponentially with the rise of a new religion, Dataism, whose foundations are inspired by scientific agnosticism, a way of thinking that seems classical but applied to research, it hides a profound revolution.
>Dataism arises from the recent human desire to collect and analyze data, data and more data, data of everything and data for everything-from the most banal
social issues to those that decide the rhythms of life and death. 
“Information flow” is one the “supreme values” of this religion. The next 
floods will be of data as we can see just looking at any electronic window.
>The recent development of gigantic clinical and biological databases, and the concomitant progress of the computational capacity to handle and analyze these growing tides of information represent the best substrate for the progress of Dataism, which in turn has managed to provide a solid content material to an always-evanescent scientific agnosticism.
>On many occasions the establishment of correlative observations seems to be sufficient to infer about the relevance of a certain factor in the development of some human pathologies. It seems that we are heading towards a path in which research, instead of being driven by hypotheses confirmed experimentally, in the near future
experimental hypotheses themselves will arise from the observation of data 
of previously performed experiments. Are we facing the end of the wet lab? 
Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research (and the 
beginning of data-correlation-driven research)?
>Deep learning is based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. Deep learning models are loosely related to information processing and communication patterns in a biological nervous system, such as neural coding that attempts to define a relationship between various stimuli and associated neuronal responses in the brain. Deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, audio recognition, speech recognition, machine
translation, natural language processing, social network filtering, 
bioinformatics and drug design, where they have produced results comparable 
to and in some cases superior to human experts. Will be 
data-correlation-driven research the new scientific method for unsupervised 
deep learning machines? Will computers became fundamentalists of Dataism?
>Best regards,
>AJ
> 
>---
>Alberto J. Schuhmacher, PhD.
> Head, Molecular Oncology Group
> 
> Aragon Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón)
> Biomedical Research Center of Aragon (CIBA)
> Avda. Juan Bosco 13, 50009 Zaragoza (Spain)
> email: ajimenez at iisaragon.es
> Phone:(+34) 637939901

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