The journey towards high-throughput computing in life sciences is discussed in this paper. The earliest adopters of grid and cloud computing in the life sciences were molecular biology and medical imaging, later joined by drug discovery and neuroscience. Now that grid technology is mature and cloud technology is maturing, pilot agent platforms provide a powerful mechanism to hide technological evolution. The emergence of Big Data is also relevant to the life sciences where the growth in High-Throughput Sequencing machines in many laboratories around the world brings new challenges and opportunities.