Designer science and the |[ldquo]|omic|[rdquo]| revolution

Following the success of the human genome project effort, several other “omic” disciplines have emerged, with the goal of analyzing the components of a living organism in its entirety. Proteomics (the complete set of proteins produced in a cell), phenomics (the complete set of mutational phenotypes), epigenomics (the complete set of methylation alterations in the genome), ligandomics (the complete set of organic small molecules), and so forth, have each focused on the accumulation of the totality of biological information of a molecular type.