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Jason Williams — "Conquest of Abundance: Genomics in a Time of Plenty"

Affiliation: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) — DNA Learning Center Day / session: Day 4 (Thu Jun 26, 2025) — Keynote 3, Grace Auditorium (9:00–10:00) Talk title: "Conquest of Abundance: Genomics in a Time of Plenty" Slides (Zenodo DOI): to verify after publish Video: GBCC2025 playlist Abstract / schedule: GBCC2025 program

Thesis

The closing keynote of GBCC2025 is a meta-talk, not a methods-talk. The "Conquest of Abundance" framing — riffing on Feyerabend's posthumous book of the same title — flips the usual data-deluge narrative: the problem is no longer scarcity of sequence, it is the abundance itself, and specifically who gets to use it. The argument is almost certainly that infrastructure, training, and equity of access — not the next algorithm — are what determine whether a time of genomic plenty actually compounds into useful biology, and that this is a community-design question as much as a technical one.

Speaker context

Williams works at the CSHL DNA Learning Center, the longest-running large-scale genomics-education effort in the country, and has been a consistent voice on training, access, and equity in computational biology — including substantial involvement in AnVIL training and the broader "cloud-genomics for everyone" agenda. Closing GBCC2025 with him — after Pond's in-the-browser-compute keynote and Soneson's classes-to-community keynote — is a deliberate sequencing: tools, then ecosystem, then who can actually pick the tools up. The CSHL venue makes the choice doubly fitting; the DNA Learning Center is on the same grounds as the meeting.

Connections to the corpus

  • AnVIL — Williams is part of the CSHL AnVIL training effort; the keynote is the natural meta-frame for the AnVIL / cloud-access entries
  • AACR axis: bioinfo-tools — but at the meta-level: not which tools, but who can use them. This is the under-represented axis in the AACR vault and a deliberate counterweight in the GBCC closing slot
  • Cross-link to GBCC2025 Oral Session 4 (Doyle on Bioconductor in Africa; Gauthier on UseGalaxy Canada; Santana on Brazilian sertão research; Kucher on AnVIL training) — the training/access content the keynote thematically caps
  • Cross-link to the GBCC2025 index — the closing keynote of the conference

Open questions

  • How directly does Williams engage the Feyerabend reference — is "Conquest of Abundance" load-bearing philosophical scaffolding or just a striking title? The title alone doesn't tell us.
  • Does the talk surface concrete proposals (curriculum, funding mechanisms, AnVIL features) or stay on the framing level? Closing keynotes often lean rhetorical; Williams's training-program day-job leans concrete.
  • Where does AI fit — does the abundance argument get extended to LLM-generated analyses (echoing Pond's Day-2 opening), or stay on the human-training side? The schedule places the two keynotes in dialogue whether or not Williams cites Pond directly.