Apple among finalists for science award

More than 2,400 scientists from around the world were independently surveyed by market research firm BioInformatics for the companies that have "made the greatest contributions to life science technology in the past year." The awards recognize those life science suppliers voted 'best-in-class' in each of the 18 categories. Overall, Apple is one of 23 finalists selected from the pool of 'hundreds' of nominations.

Judging by the number of articles I've seen recently praising Apple's new computer products, and nearly none for Dell or HP, I would be astonished if Apple didn't win this by a 10-to-1 vote margin.

Well, funny thing is that the Mac is still catching up to the PC in basic Bioinformatics applications.

Basic DNA sequence and phylogenetic analyses are easier to do with free Windows apps like MEGA and BioEdit. These apps have great GUI interfaces with broad feature sets that can't be matched in OSX.

There are some Mac Apps with equivalent functions available, but most (except 4Peaks) are either not user friendly, not stable, or only work in OS9 (!!!). Many of the OSX versions are simply Linux ports. And one of the most reputable apps (MacClade) isn't free and last I checked still stuck in OS9.

Its unbelievable we can get superclusters of Macs to crunch numbers for complex DNA analyses (using custom apps), but we don't even have a decent protein or DNA sequence analysis and alignment app.

What does the application have anything to do with it. If it did, shouldnt they nominate the maker of the software rather than the computer it gets installed on? Makes no sense..

What does the hardware have to do with it if there isn't any software available to make good use of the platform?

Apple would really deserve this award if they helped promote/support bioinformatics software for their platform.

The hardware isn't really important unless software enables it for use in the field.