Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ted Kennedy, and others in December 1987 (S. 100-1966). Hearings
were held on February 22, 1988, at which Victor McKusick, James
Wyngaarden (director of the NIH), and Lindberg testifi ed. Supporters
of the bill had closely connected it to the HGP, portraying the need for
biotechnology information coordination as central to the project and
important for American competitiveness in biotechnology. As support
for the HGP grew, the bill's passage became more likely; it was signed
into law by President Reagan on November 4, 1988. It provided for the
creation of a National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI),
under the auspices of the NLM, with twelve full-time employees and
a budget of $10 million per year for fi scal years 1988 through 1992.
74
Lindberg conceived the role of the NCBI not as a replacement or
supplement for GenBank, but as a way to bring order to the different
kinds of biological information and databases that had begun to pro-
liferate. In his testimony in support of the legislation, Donald Fredrick-
son, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, argued that
the NCBI was necessitated by the fact that “not only are the databases
being fl ooded with information they cannot manage, but each database
uses a different information system or computer language. We have cre-
ated a sort of Tower of Babel.”
75
“Talking one genetic language” char-
acterizes how the NCBI sought to coordinate diverse sorts of biological
information from many sources and at many levels, from cell types to
pharmaceuticals. By the time funds for the NCBI were appropriated,
Lindberg had already recruited David Lipman to direct the new cen-
ter. Lipman had been working in Bethesda since 1983 and was already
widely respected in the small community of computational biologists
for his contribution to sequence-matching algorithms. In the existing
biological databases, Lipman saw a tangled mess of overlapping sys-
tems and overly complicated schemas; he brought a youthful energy to
the task of integrating databases and restoring sense and simplicity to
GenBank and other biological information resources.
76
Under Lipman's
direction, the NCBI moved quickly to take over GenBank, arguing that
its mission to integrate and link databases required close control.
77
By
October 1989, it had been agreed that after the end of the current Gen-
Bank contract, control of the database would be passed from NIGMS to
NCBI—it would be managed in-house rather than under contract to a
third party.
78
NCBI took over the task of collecting nucleotide sequence
data as Los Alamos' role was phased out.
Before GenBank formally arrived at NCBI in 1992, efforts were al-
ready under way to fundamentally change its structure. Commensurate
with the overall mission of the NCBI, the aim was the make GenBank
