Sir

The UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) does seem to share Peter Campbell's view that interdisciplinary research teams are a good way to drive bioinformatics forward (Nature 401, 321; 1999). Indeed, over the past few years, it has supported just this kind of research through a joint initiative with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The reviewing panel has typically assigned high weightings to projects that represent collaborations between biology and computer-science departments.

The conclusion reached by Campbell, and perhaps by the BBSRC — that it is difficult to find researchers adept in both computer science and biology — is puzzling. I would consider myself as just such a person: a scientific ‘jack of all trades’. No doubt, to most biologists I appear to be a computer scientist, and to most computer scientists I appear to be a biologist. I believe that I know at least enough about both fields to understand some of the important problems in biology and which computational methods might be most appropriately applied to at least some of them.

But are people like me as hard to find as Campbell believes? Certainly, in other fields, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry or astronomy, there is no shortage of scientists with skills in their own subject and in computation. Of course, there is still a wealth of opportunity for collaboration between these fields and the computer sciences.

So, are ‘all-in-one bioinformaticists’ really in such short supply? I did a straw poll of the software packages that my colleagues and I use regularly. I found 20 bioinformatics packages to be particularly vital to our research projects, ranging from sequence alignment programs to molecular graphics software. The principal or sole authors of 18 of them are computer-savvy biologists. Although this is an inconclusive experiment in statistical terms, the message is clear. Biologists with strong computer skills are certainly out there somewhere. So funding bodies should finance interdisciplinary research in bioinformatics, but must not forget the ‘jacks of all trades’ who have already made such a useful contribution.