First there was in vivo biology, then in vitro and now the discipline is moving in silico. Or, to paraphrase US political strategist James Carville, whose campaign slogan helped put former US President Bill Clinton in power, the watchwords for future success in biology could easily be: “It's the computing, stupid”. Biologists will have to be adept at least in handling the tools of bioinformatics, and, for true insight, they will be better placed learning the informatics needed to create at least some tools for themselves. Says Tim Hubbard, head of human sequence analysis at the Sanger Centre in Hinxton: “If you don't, you are at the mercy of the developers.”
One man who has seen the transition to the in-silico world is Graham Cameron, a loquacious and amiable Scot, who was the sole person looking after the newish database at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in 1982. He was one of the prime movers in the formation of the EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), which he now heads along with geneticist Michael Ashburner.
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