James F. Crow, in the conclusion to his great article in the current Annual Review of Genetics, in which he reflects on a personal history of empirical approaches in genetics:
It is hard to contemplate this period, with its dominating controversies, without pangs of sadness. In those days, people did an enormous amount of work to obtain minimal, often equivocal results. The experiments of Wallace (65) and Mukai (48) involved counting millions of Drosophilas. Now we think nothing of databases including tens of thousands of genes and hundreds of thousands of variants. But the machines do the counting. How different life for these people would have been if they had had only a few of the tools that are now available.
