Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Building Computers
Before we can understand the effects of computers on bi-
ology, we need to understand what sorts of things com-
puters
are
. Electronic computers were being used in biol-
ogy even in the 1950s, but before 1980 they remained
on the margins of biology—only a handful of biologists
considered them important to their work. Now most bi-
ologists would fi nd their work impossible without using
a computer in some way. It seems obvious—to biologists
as well as laypeople—that computers, databases, algo-
rithms, and networks are appropriate tools for biological
work. How and why did this change take place?
Perhaps it was computers that changed. As comput-
ers got better, a standard argument goes, they were able
to handle more and more data and increasingly complex
calculations, and they gradually became suitable for bio-
logical problems. This chapter argues that it was, in fact,
the other way around: it was biology that changed to be-
come a computerized and computerizable discipline. At
the center of this change were data, especially sequence
data. Computers are data processors: data storage, data
management, and data analysis machines. During the
1980s, biologists began to produce large amounts of se-
quence data. These data needed to be collected, stored,
maintained, and analyzed. Computers—data processing
machines—provided a ready-made tool.
