Quantative Biology

"It is surprising that no one has made this calibration before. Biology
has tended to be descriptive," said Pollard. "This technology is part
of moving biology to be more quantitative and mechanistic. You can't
understand the chemistry and physics of cells without knowing the
concentrations of the proteins."

Researchers make cell biology quantitative

I'll say, this is a long time coming in the information age. Once you make the leap from qualitative to quantitative science, you make the leap to being able to open up the whole area of science to the world of information processing, which will push the field much much faster.

"People working on yeast should
be able to use this method straight out," said Pollard. "Tagging
proteins by manipulating their genes is a bit more complicated in other
organisms, but it can be done with some work -- even in human or plant
cells."

So it should be relatively simple to transfer this technique to humans, or mice, where we can study the concentrations of proteins in a normal cell, and the concentrations in cancer cells, or cells afflicted with alzheimers, or TSE, or any other abnormal condition and figure out exactly what is causing the problem with a bit of time and money. At this point all we're saying is "hey, both cells have this protein" or "this cell has this protein, and this one doesn't".

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