History of Omics

From Omics.org

The History of Omics: as a generic name for various omics and a standalone biology discipline.

For the history of Omics.org and its background see History of Omics.org

In a broad philosophical perspective, the origin of omics is perhaps as long as human history. Humans have recognized that biological things including humans are not simple sum of the parts but a complex and somewhat emergently encapsulated whole. Society could be viewed as an organism as much as the whole Earth one giant organism such as Gaia. Omics as a concept can be very old. Omics as a specific term, it is probable that people who have been working on various omics such as genomics and proteomics used the term independently in the mid 1990s (I have not heard people saying 'omics' before 1994).

The omics field in biology in modern world is also implicitly old. Perhaps the core of many biological omes is the genome. The word Genome was coined in 1920 by Hans Winkler, Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, Germany, as a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. 
The word genomics is said to be appeared in the 1980s and became widely used in the 1990s.
The first genome was completely sequenced by Sanger in Cambridge, UK, in the 1970s. It is a good question if Sanger himself called his virus genome, a genome. Genome is the most fundamental part of many omics. However, the omics part of the genetics is in fact not genome specific. Genomics implies some hidden network among genetic elements. The network is regulated by many other omics such as proteomics, transcripomics, metabolomics and physiomics.

The explosion of the omics terms reflects 1) reinforced holistic point of view in understanding life, 2) expansion and differentiation of  relatively simple chunk of life into various encapsulated biological domains, and 3) technical advancement in computer science to integrate complex biological data through bioinformatics.

Bioinformatists played the most important role in the explosion of omics. Effectively they changed the conventional biology completely and laid a new philosophical foundation of studying life.

In the early 1990s, bioinformatists' role was relatively passive in the sense that they helped biologists or were working on relatively small theoretical problems in biophysics, structural biology, genomics, proteomics, and biochemistry. However, in the mid 1990s, their theoretical views were gaining acceptance more and more. In the past, those were too theoretical or technically too vague. However, as the whole genome sequences were deciphered en masse, their tools, prediction and insights were going much ahead of most biologists. This consequently resulted in them coining new words to describe new theoretical problems and concepts. Although there were very few professional bioinformatists (perhaps less than 100 in total throughout the world in 1995), some of their speculations, jargons and hypes were acceptable enough by general biologists.

In the late 1990s, these people alongside more progressive biologists produced numerous -omics terms. These were often limited to small groups of labs or new terms were nearly jokingly coined. Some of the omics concepts were useful to describe more organic and large scale biological domains. The strong tie between IT(Internet) and bioinformatics paved the way for growing omics world.  In the early 2000s, there appreared a big trend on the internet where biologists produced papers, internet sites and proposals where they  introduce new omics.

There have always been sceptic and cautious remarks on the abuse of -omics. However, the omics terms are not a mere fashion, but a scientifically useful and practical concept. It is a refinement process typically found in the development of science. Soon, people will realize the hidden redundancy and relatedness among the seemingly distinct omics fields. This will result in a more systematic way of classifying omics and the contents. Omomics is the study of omics relationships and networks.

In the future, there will be strong attractors among them. The whole life science will have an efficient tool to integrate complex biological knowledge.

-- Jong Bhak