Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
that she turned her attention to problems of proteins and evolution.
Ledley himself was a pioneer in bringing computers to bear on biomedi-
cal problems, trained as a dentist, but also as a physicist and a math-
ematician, during the early 1950s, Ledley worked with the Standards
Eastern Automatic Computer at the National Bureau of Standards
(NBS) in Maryland. The knowledge of digital computing architecture
that Ledley attained at the NBS led him fi rst to problems in operations
research (OR) and then to the application of computers to biomedicine.
In particular, Ledley was interested in using computers to create a math-
ematized biology that would allow, for example, computerized medical
diagnosis.
11
Ledley had a very specifi c vision of how computers would be use-
ful to biology. In his OR work, Ledley had emphasized the transla-
tion of messy situational data into logical problems that computers
could understand and solve. In his work with George Gamow on the
genetic code, Ledley devised a way for biologists to translate their
protein-coding schemes into matrices and symbolic logic that could be
easily dealt with on a computer.
12
Likewise, in biology and medicine,
computers would be tools that could be used for statistics, accounting,
and data management.
13
In his lengthy survey of the fi eld (published
in 1964, although much of it was written some years earlier), Ledley
outlined his justifi cation for the computer management of biomedical
information:
The feasibility of such a system from a computer-technology
point of view is unquestioned; there are already computers that
carry out such closely related processes as making nation-wide
airline and hotel reservations, recording, updating, and tallying
bank accounts and other fi nancial records, controlling large-
scale defense installations, and so forth.
14
At the NBRF, Dayhoff and Ledley began to apply computers to the
solution of problems involving large quantities of experimental data.
In 1962, the pair developed a computer program to aid in the experi-
mental determination of protein sequences. Previously, the only way to
experimentally determine a protein's complete sequence was to fi nd the
sequences of short fragments of the chain and then “try to reconstruct
the entire protein chain by a logical and combinatorial examination of
overlapping fragments.”
15
For larger protein chains, it quickly became
an almost impossible task to assemble fragments by hand. Dayhoff and
Ledley's program not only rapidly checked possible arrangements, but
