Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ated with the personal computer. A good example of the way scientists began
to use personal computers in the 1980s can be found in
Nature
, “An Eye for
Success.”
32. Bishop, “Software Club.”
33. This is not to say computers were not used for anything else. Biolo-
gists continued to use computers for all the kinds of activities listed in this
paragraph. Simulation and prediction of protein folding, which has played a
particularly visible role, emerged in the 1990s as a distinct area of research
within bioinformatics. This is also a case in which sequence data (here, amino
acid rather than DNA or RNA sequence) play a crucial role; for bioinformat-
ics, problems of structure prediction can be reduced to problems of collecting
and analyzing data in order to model the relationship between amino acid
sequence and three-dimensional spatial data.
34. The thesis is Goad, “A Theoretical Study of Extensive Cosmic Ray Air
Showers” [WBG papers]. Other work is cited below.
35. On computers at Los Alamos, see Metropolis, “Los Alamos Experi-
ence”; Anderson, “Metropolis, Monte Carlo, and the MANIAC”; Metropolis
and Nelson, “Early Computing at Los Alamos.”
36. Mackenzie, “The Infl uence of the Los Alamos,” 189.
37. See, for instance, Goad, “Wat” [WBG papers].
38. See, for instance, Goad and Johnson, “A Montecarlo Method.”
39. Goad, “A Theoretical Study of Extensive Cosmic Ray Air Showers”
[WBG papers].
40. Goad and Cann, “Theory of Moving Boundary Electrophoresis”; Goad
and Cann, “Theory of Zone Electrophoresis”; Goad and Cann, “Theory of
Transport.”
41. This is not a complete account of Goad's work during this period.
He also contributed to studies on the distribution of disease, the digestion of
polyoxynucleotides, and protein-nucleic acid association rates, among others.
Some of this work involved other kinds of transport phenomena, and all of it
involved statistical methods and computers.
42. Goad, “Vita.” [WBG papers]
43. Goad, “T-division” [WBG papers].
44. On the diffi culties of theoretical biology, see Keller, “Untimely Births of
Mathematical Biology,” in
Making Sense of Life
, 79-112.
45. On Dayhoff, see Strasser, “Collecting, Comparing, and Computing
Sequences.”
46. Los Alamos National Laboratory, “T-10 Theoretical Biology and Bio-
physics” [WBG papers].
47. See Dietrich, “Paradox and Persuasion”; Hagen, “Naturalists.”
48. Goad (undated letter to Japan[?]) [WBG papers].
49. Ulam, “Some Ideas and Prospects”; Goad, “Sequence Analysis.”
50. For a history of sequence comparison algorithms, see Stevens, “Coding
Sequences.” Some seminal papers from this group: Beyer et al., “A Molecular
Sequence Metric”; Waterman et al., “Some Biological Sequence Metrics”;
Smith and Waterman, “Identifi cation of Common Molecular Subsequences.”
