Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
change both the direction of biological research and the relationship of
biology with computing. Since the early 1980s, the amount of sequence
data has continued to grow at an exponential rate. The computer was
a perfect tool with which to cope with the overwhelming fl ow of data.
The second and third parts of this chapter consist of two case studies:
the fi rst of Walter Goad, a physicist who turned his computational skills
toward biology in the 1960s; and the second of James Ostell, a compu-
tationally minded PhD student in biology at Harvard University in the
1980s. These examples show how the practices of computer use were
imported from physics into biology and struggled to establish them-
selves there. These practices became established as a distinct subdisci-
pline of biology—bioinformatics—during the 1990s.
What Is a Computer?
The computer was an object designed and constructed to solve par-
ticular sorts of problems, fi rst for the military and, soon afterward, for
Big Physics. Computers were (and are) good at solving certain types of
problems: numerical simulations, differential equations, stochastic and
statistical problems, and problems involving the management of large
amounts of data.
4
The modern electronic computer was born in World War II. Almost
all the early attempts to build mechanical calculating devices were associ-
ated with weapons or the war effort. Paul Edwards argues that “for two
decades, from the early 1940s until the early 1960s, the armed forces of
the United States were the single most important driver of digital com-
puter development.”
5
Alan Turing's eponymous machine was conceived
to solve a problem in pure mathematics, but its fi rst physical realization
at Bletchley Park was as a device to break German ciphers.
6
Howard
Aiken's Mark I, built by IBM between 1937 and 1943, was used by the
US Navy's Bureau of Ships to compute mathematical tables.
7
The com-
puters designed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Pennsylvania in the late 1930s were purpose-built for bal-
listics computations at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
8
A
large part of the design and the institutional impetus for the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), also developed at the
Moore School, came from John von Neumann. As part of the Manhat-
tan Project, von Neumann was interested in using computers to solve
problems in the mathematics of implosion. Although the ENIAC did not
become functional until after the end of the war, its design—the kinds of
problems it was supposed to solve—refl ected wartime priorities.
