Earlier today it was announced that the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine would be shared by Shinya Yamanaka for his discovery of 4 genes that could turn a normal cell back into a pluripotent cell. 
An effect originally shown by John B. Gurdon with his work on frog eggs over 40 years ago. The NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database under accession number GSE5259 contains all 24 candidate genes that were suspected to play a role in returning a cell to a non-specialized state. A practical near-term impact of the research however may be overlooked. That is you can have all of Dr. Yamanaka’s experimental DNA microarray data used in making the prize winning discovery.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock on Mars, or you don’t care what dorky scientists are up to, then you may have heard of the ENCODE project. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements isn’t winning any Nobel Prizes, not yet anyways, and if what many researchers believe to be true, it never will. All the datasets can be found, spun up, played with, and used as fodder for a new round of pure in silico research from the ENCODE Virtual Machine and Cloud Resource.
What ENCODE and the Nobel Prize in Medicine have in common is ushering in a new paradigm of raw experimental data/protocol/methodology sharing. ENCODE, which generated huge amounts of varied data across 400+ labs has made all of the raw data available online. They go one step further to provide the exact analytic pipelines utilized per experiment, including the raw datasets, as Virtual Machines. The lines between scientist and engineers are blurring, the best of either will have to be a bit of both. From the Nobel data, can you find the 4 genes out of the 24 responsible for pluripotent mechanisms? Are there similarly valuable needles, lost in the haystack of ENCODE data? Go ahead, give it a GREP through.
Citations:
- “The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – Press Release“. Nobelprize.org. 9 Oct 2012
- Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Mouse Embryonic and Adult Fibroblast Cultures by Defined Factors
Kazutoshi Takahashi, Shinya Yamanaka
Cell – 25 August 2006 (Vol. 126, Issue 4, pp. 663-676) - ENCODE Nature Portal
Petri Dish Talk 