Content about Ewan Birney

Ewan Birney, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, says that biology has now transformed to become a 'big-data science'. Ahead of his keynote talk at this month’s EUDAT 2nd conference, he explains that the field faces both what he terms 'blue-' and 'white-collar problems' in handling this data deluge.

Plus, could DNA really be the future of data storage? Birney believes it could be. "DNA is remarkable," he says. "Just one gram of DNA can store about a petabyte’s worth of data… it's estimated that you could put the whole internet into the size of a van!"