Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and conference mailing lists to generate a database of researchers in-
terested in artifi cial intelligence and molecular biology. The conference
that Hunter organized around his list became the fi rst Intelligent Sys-
tems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting, held in Washington, DC,
in 1993 and jointly sponsored by the NLM and the National Science
Foundation.
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It was also during the early 1990s that the fi rst moves were made
toward establishing specially designed bioinformatics courses at the
undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1993, undergraduate and doc-
toral programs were established in bioinformatics at Baylor College of
Medicine, Rice University, and the University of Houston. These were
followed in 1996 by programs at Northwestern University, Rutgers Uni-
versity, and the University of Washington. By 1999, according to one
report, there were twenty-one bioinformatics programs in the United
States.
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What caused this institutionalization of bioinformatics? It would be
possible to tell this story as part of a history of the Human Genome
Project (HGP)—many of the sequence data on which computers went to
work were generated as part of human genome mapping and sequenc-
ing efforts. However, the story might just as easily be told the other way
around: the HGP became a plausible and thinkable project only because
methods of managing large amounts of data were already coming into
existence in the 1980s. Computers had begun to be used for managing
sequence data before the HGP's beginnings. The HGP, while crystalliz-
ing the institutional development of bioinformatics, depended on the
prior existence of bioinformatic practices of data management. It was
the possibility of being able to store and manage the 3 billion base pairs
of the human genome on a computer that made the project make sense.
Similar problems of data management had arisen
before
the HGP.
Almost since GenBank's inception in 1982, its managers and advi-
sors were under constant pressure to keep up with the increases in the
publication of sequence data. By 1985, Los Alamos (along with Bolt,
Beranek and Newman, which shared the responsibility for running
GenBank) was complaining of the diffi culties of keeping up with the
rate of sequence production: “The average amount of new information
[each month] . . . is fully half the size of the fi rst GenBank release in Oc-
tober 1982.”
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The cause of their concern was clear: a fi xed budget and
a fi xed number of staff had to cope with an exponentially growing set of
sequences. Coping with this problem was the major challenge for Gen-
Bank throughout the 1980s—the need for timely entry and complete-
