Biology and Informatics - Essays in Bioinformatics - page 9

complex constitution, as belonging to one natural species. It is impossible to claim that these ideas are
anything but preliminary guesses, but they have the advantage of being susceptible to experimental test."
J. D. Bernal (1931) [Int. Congress of the History of Science. Bernal Archive, Cambridge. A4.7 Box 22, by
courtesy of Andrew Brown].
10 Philip Ball, “Portrait of a molecule”, Nature, 421, 421-422, (23 January 2003).
11 H. F. Judson, "The Eighth Day of Creation", Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979.
Robert Olby, "The Path to the Double Helix ", Macmillan, London,
Nature, 421 , (6921), (23 Jan. 2003) [special supplement for the 50 th anniversary of the double helix]
12 Schroedinger used the term “aperiodic crystal” which later entered the discussion of quasi-crystals after
1985. He said: “We believe a gene - or perhaps the whole of the chromosome fibre - to be an aperiodic
solid”.
13 J. Needham, "Order and Life", (1936) Reprinted MIT Press, 1968. [Dedicated to the Theoretical Biology
Club.]
14 The Colossus computer, all copies of which were destroyed after the war on Churchill's orders, is now being
rebuilt at Bletchley Park as an historic monument.
15 L. Brillouin, "Science and Information Theory", New York, 1956.
C. E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication", University of Illinois
Press, (1949).
D. M. Mackay, "Quantal Aspects of Scientific Information", Phil. Mag., 41, (1950) and Proc. First London
Symposium on Information Theory, (1950)
16 A. L. Mackay, "Optimisation of the genetic code", Nature, 216 , 159-160, (1967).
17 "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphical representation of data abstracted from
the banks of every computer in the human cystem. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-
space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receeding... " William Gibson (ca.
1982).
18 A. D. Booth, “A magnetic digital storage system”, Electronic Engineering (July, 1949)
19 J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) wrote, very presciently,
“Even in a non-mathematician like myself, some differential equations evoke fairly violent physical
sensations similar to those described by Sappho and Catullus when viewing their mistresses. Personally,
however, I obtain an even greater 'kick' from finite difference equations, which are perhaps more like those
which an up-to-date materialist would use to describe human behaviour”. Haldane was, indeed “an up-to-date
materialist”! “The Inequality of Man ”, (1932), Penguin, (1937), p. 39.
Robert M. May, Nature, 261 , 459-, (10 June 1976).
(http://nedwww,ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept01/May/May_contents.html)
See also: A. L. Mackay, Physics Bulletin, 495-497, (Nov. 1976) and Izv. Jugoslav. Centra za Krist., 10 , 25-
36, (1975). (http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/surfaces/zagreb.html). J. W. Galloway, Physics Bulletin, 34 , 161-164,
(1983).
20 Stephen Wolfram, "A New Kind of Science", Wolfram Media, 2002.
21 For example, P. Ball, “The self-made tapestry: Pattern formation in Nature” , Oxford, (1999).
22 Nature, 421 , (23 January 2003).
23 A. L. Mackay, "From 'The Dialectics of Nature' to the inorganic gene", Foundations of Chemistry, 1 , (1),
43-56, (1999).
24 I have discussed this at greater length in “From the 'Dialectics of Nature' to the inorganic gene”,
Foundations of Chemistry, 1 , 43-56, (1999).
25 A. M. Lesk, "Introduction to Bioinformatics", Oxford University Press, 2002.
(www.oup.com/uk/lesk/bioinf/)
26 Matt Ridley, "Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters ", Fourth Estate, London, 1999.
“Nature via Nurture”, Fourth Estate, London, 2003.
27 Military uses of bioinformatics are discussed in: Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, “Plague Wars”,
Macmillan, London, 1999.
28 Concerns about anthrax illustrate this. The USSR had a serious accident releasing anthrax; the USA also had
a dramatic terrorist attack associated with its own weapons programme; much earlier Churchill wished to use
anthrax, tested on Gruinard Island in the North of Scotland, against the German civil population; Iraq too, had
sought to develop anthrax.
29 In Britain already two million DNA profiles are held in police records.
30 If you are a scientist at an American research university like mine, you know what to do if you think you've
hit on some technique or bit of knowledge that might have commercial potential. You go online to the
university's technology transfer office, download an invention and technology disclosure form, and fill in the
details. You have to do that because all such intellectual property (IP) discovered by this university's
employees belongs to the university. If the local bureaucrats think there's something in it, they will file a