Leap forward a few decades and genome testing now comes as standard. The outcomes go on record with every newborn’s birth certificate, while the existing population has been offered it for free, to bring their data into line.
The healthcare benefits of understanding how our bodies work has led from people tracking their steps every day via the latest wearables to DNA profiling becoming the new norm. Knowing that your sensitivity to saturated fat is above average, for example, can lead you to make lifestyle changes that could massively decrease your risk of heart disease.
But just because we all have this data, it doesn’t mean everyone understands how to use it, and it can be difficult to find patterns within the huge amount of diverse information we are continually gathering about ourselves.
Navigating a forest of facts and figures
Data Scientists find, manipulate, and analyze — with the aim of putting the complex world of digital data into context.
When you have millions of pieces of information from multiple sources, you need them to make sense in order to be useful — to extract ideas, solutions, and useful learnings. Looking for a needle in a haystack is an understatement when it comes to truly big data sets, and knowing how to organize seemingly endless amounts of information is a skill many take for granted.
But it’s not just about sorting and tidying, Data Scientists apply their boundless abilities to extract meaning from information that others might overlook. To be able to find population health patterns from multiple lines of an individual’s DNA is essential if we’re to benefit from our obsessive gathering of intelligence about ourselves.
Data Scientists are intelligence detectives, seeking out clear answers in even the messiest of places. They ask question after question, and are unsatisfied with half-answers. They analyze mountains of data in an experimental, exploratory process while never losing sight of the bigger picture. They let their minds wander to the ‘what if?’.
They are intelligence detectives, seeking out clear answers in even the messiest of places. They are patient, and well aware that processing learnings and achieving crucial insights takes time. They are the masters of manipulating, redesigning, and reordering data until its secrets are laid bare.
In our world of complex, messy human information, sprawled across the internet and anywhere the cloud will hold it, and with no sign of our appetite for mercurial knowledge slowing down, Data Scientists — the playful detectives — are the ones who hold the key to unlocking what data really means for each of us, and society as a whole.
Illustration: Matthew Hollister
