The Fourth Wave

Meditations for the anxious scientific mind

Science is accelerating at a rate I can’t keep up with. I don’t mean that in the grand, abstract sense. I mean me, personally — trying to stay on top of the literature, the grants, the methods, and right now, the speed with which AI is changing everything. Because it is changing everything.

I think I’m in the fourth wave of my career, and I find it instructive to look back at the previous three. Each transition felt like the ground shifting beneath my feet. Each one worked out fine.

When I came through, PhD students sequenced a handful of genes and that was considered a solid body of work. We aligned them to their homologues, inferred phylogenetic trees, said something about evolutionary history. Sequencing a single gene was an achievement worth celebrating. Then, around the turn of the century, genomes arrived, and the old approaches became almost quaint overnight. The scale of everything changed. We needed new algorithms, new software, new ways of thinking. I remember feeling genuinely overwhelmed.

But even then, genome sequencing wasn’t something a normal lab could just do. We were dependent on the big sequencing centres. We were secondary users of their data, grateful recipients. That lasted several years.

Then came wave three, about ten years later, when sequencing became accessible to ordinary research groups at ordinary universities, far from the centres of everything. We’d been looking forward to that democratisation for years. When it arrived, it arrived fast, and the problems it created were different from the ones we’d expected. We were suddenly drowning in genomes. The anxiety didn’t disappear; it just changed where it came from. Were we doing it properly? Quickly enough? As well as the lab down the road?

Now here we are, my friends, with AI and genome editing both arriving at once, demanding new vocabulary, new tools, new thoughts. The anxiety is back in the room. I can feel it in my colleagues.

I feel different about it this time, though. I’m naive about how much is changing, but I’ve watched this film before.

The pattern is consistent enough that I trust it.

A wave of technology arrives. It feels destabilising. People worry their work isn’t moving fast enough, that they’re being left behind, that what they know is becoming obsolete. And then, over some span of years, it settles. The field absorbs the new tools. The researchers who stayed focused on genuine questions find that those questions are still worth answering.

We will still be doing this in ten years. Almost certainly in a hundred. The work doesn’t stop because the methods change.

The anxiety is understandable. I’ve felt it myself, three times now. But I think the more productive response (and I say this as someone who used to feel it acutely) is to notice the pattern and let it do some work for you.

You are doing good. Keep going.