Biology and Informatics - Essays in Bioinformatics - page 1

Biology and Informatics
Alan L. MACKAY
School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London 1 , Malet Street, London
WC1E 7HX
(The Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 19-24 May 2003)
Abstract. The advent of modern bioinformatics is the result of a long succession of
scientific discoveries and paradigm changes in chemistry and biology. This chapter
provides an introduction to the pertinent events in these diverse fields.
Introduction
"Is it not a wonder that anyone can bring himself to believe that a number of solid and
separate particles by their chance collisions and moved only by the force of their own
weight could bring into being so marvellous and beautiful a world?" Marcus Tullius Cicero 2
(106-43 BC), "On the Nature of the Gods"
“Molecular Biology is the confluence of information and conformation” John
Kendrew, (1965)
"How does so little information control so much behaviour?" Richard L. Gregory, in
Towards a Theoretical Biology , (ed. C. H. Waddington), (1969)
"In less than a generation we have witnessed a radical, irreversible, world-wide
transformation in the way that science is organised, managed and performed." John Ziman,
"Real science: what it is, and what it means", CUP 2000, (p.67).
1. Atomism
The city of Dubrovnik, earlier The Republic of Ragusa, in which this workshop was held, is
a historic place and we have to mention its most famous scientist, Roger Joseph Boscovich 3
(1711-1787, FRS (1761)), who was born here and who looked after its interests, although
he usually resided elsewhere. He worked mostly on astronomy, but he was an atomist and
had proposed an important theory of point atoms, between which were mutual forces with a
number of minima at different distances, running from a strong repulsion at very short
distances, to an inverse square attraction like gravitation at very long distances 4 . This
removed difficulties about what happens at the discontinuity of the surface of a billiard-ball
kind of atom. Boscovich, who was a Jesuit, lived a generation after Newton and influenced
Maxwell and Kelvin among others. He aimed to understand the properties of things in
terms of their structure and his main work was called “Philosophiae naturalis theoria
reducta ad unicum legem virium in natura existentium”, (Vienna, 1758, etc.) [Physics
reduced to a single law of the forces existing in nature]. Also in Dubrovnik, Marin
Getaldic 5 (1568-1626), a century earlier, appears as a pioneer of the algebraic geometry
which is the basis of computer graphics. Already two and three hundred years ago
European scientists were remarkably closely in touch with each other.