Buy into 'big data': the biggest upheaval since the industrial revolution

The collection of vast data pools is revolutionising everything from medicine to agriculture, and the firms at the forefront stand to profit, says David Thornton.

The collection of vast data pools is revolutionising everything from medicine to agriculture, and the firms at the forefront stand to profit, says David Thornton.

About ten years ago I found myself standing on a lawn with some of Britain's leading scientists. We had gathered at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, where my wife was working, to celebrate the completion of the Human Genome Project. The mood was jubilant as we watched a spectacular fireworks display. It had been a long journey. The scientists had started out by decoding the genetic makeup of viruses. Even these simple entities can have more than 100,000 base pairs (the building blocks of the genome). A human being has rather more about three billion. To unravel a sequence on this scale within an acceptable margin of error took time, money and a completely new scale of computer-processing power. In all, it took 13 years and $3bn to complete the project.

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David Thornton is a small cap share expert with over 30 years’ experience in the investment world. He was an equity fund manager at Henderson Global Investors for 17 years, and in 2006 he launched the Matrix New Europe Fund, investing in equities throughout Eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey.