[Qatar-pm] iHorizons R&D at QSTP

[Nigel Gourlay]

I'm only mentioning this here because Perl has traditionally been the
starting point for any bioinformatics project. In the real world, that
is.

>From press-release here:
 http://tinyurl.com/35ym32

"One of the first technologies that iHorizons will explore is
bioinformatics.  It is talking to international biotechnology partners
and aims to use its software engineering expertise to develop new
applications.  Bioinformatics is becoming an important technology in
Qatar, with medical institutes such as Qatar Foundation's Specialty
Teaching Hospital intending to use it in their research programs."

This will be interesting to see. There's no .net bioinformatics
libraries, and iHorizons are a Microsoft shop. I heard some rumours
that they might start looking at open-source, but from their careers
page it looks like they're not hiring coders any in Qatar, and the
jobs they are advertising don't require bioinformatics skills. If they
are going to use .net, they're going to have to reimplement a decade
of work.

For me, it's baffling that a content-management and localization firm
is being lined up for a scientific project. If you wanted this to
succeed, your best bet might be to relocate a complete team from a
North-American university. In fact, almost all of the commercial
bioinformatics firms are academic spinoffs.

It's depressing that the expansion of Qatar's software industry is
being subsidised by projects that are likely to fail. If you wanted to
create a software industry in Qatar, why not push compsci grads
towards localizing open-source applications. No one from outside Qatar
is ever going to hire a Qatari firm for bioinformatics, but there is a
niche in arabic software that local firms could fill.

--nigel