The frontier of biological research has moved from the wet lab to silicon. Vast amounts of information are compiled in databases from GenBank to the UK's Sanger Center to numerous private companies. Thanks to the Internet, these databases are instantly available to researchers worldwide, eliminating the drudgery of manually collating biological information, enabling relevant information to be mined at the touch of a button. That's the theory.
Reality is a lot messier.
The databases often can't talk to each other and they organize information idiosyncratically. When a researcher is dealing with tens of thousands of human genes, proteins, biological pathways, and clinical data, it's a recipe for info-indigestion. The problem goes deeper than coding. Biologists sometimes can't agree on the very definitions and concepts the databases are supposed to manage. In genomics, for example, you can't get more fundamental than the definition of a gene.