> How to integrate billions of base pairs of genomic data, and 10 times that amount of proteomic data, and historical patient data, and the results of pharmacological screens into a coherent account of how somebody got sick and what to do to make them better? How to make actionable an endless stream of new temperature and precipitation data, and oceanographic and volcanic and seismic data? How to build, and make sense of, a neuron-by-neuron map of a thinking brain? Equipping scientists with computational notebooks, or some evolved form of them, might bring their minds to a level with problems now out of reach.

The article seems to conflate the praxis of science with the archival of it. Scientists do all of the above on gigantic clusters, not on an IPython/Mathematica notebook. The purpose of publishing papers, on the other hand, is adding to the archival of knowledge, and they can be easily rendered in a laptop with LaTeX.

And they are excellent at archival, by the way. You can see papers from the 19th century still being cited. On the other hand I have had issues running a Mathematica notebook from a few releases back -- and I seriously doubt one will be able to read any of my Mathematica notebooks 150 years from now. The same with the nifty web-based redesign of the Nature paper that is mentioned: I bet the original Nature article will be readable 150 years from now, whereas I doubt the web version will last 20.