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Computer security in academia—a potential roadblock to distributed annotation of the human genome

Nature Biotechnology volume 22, pages 771–772 (2004)Cite this article

Why security is a problem

Modern science is completely dependent on computers to analyze and archive data. Moreover, certain subfields, such as genomics, increasingly use interoperating computers extensively for communication and dissemination (Fig. 1). In these fields, servers house large centralized archives, which are continually accessed by a broad community of researchers (e.g., PubMed6 and Uniprot7). These central hubs link together a vast constellation of smaller more specialized resources, focusing on particular organisms or specific aspects of molecules (e.g., Ensembl8, flybase9, MolMovDB10 and scop11), and the online text of books and journals. Intricate interoperation is required between databases and tools at different sites to enable collaboration and annotation of large data sets. Often, this is through conventional web links, but increasingly more complex interfaces are employed12. For instance, to find out all the information associated with a particular human protein, one currently has to perform a distributed query over many disparate sites. Many believe, in fact, that the future annotation of the human genome will involve a massive federation of interconnecting and interoperating information servers13,14,15.

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Figure 1: The number of computer security incidents over the past 15 years.

Erin Boyle

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, Yale University, P.O. Box 208114, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Dov Greenbaum

  2. Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Yale University, P.O. Box 208114, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Shawn M Douglas & Joanna Lim

  3. the Department of Computer Science, Yale University, P.O. Box 208114, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Michael Fischer & Martin Schultz

  4. Departments of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and of Computer Science, Yale University, P.O. Box 208114, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Andrew Smith & Mark Gerstein

Authors
  1. Dov Greenbaum
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  2. Shawn M Douglas
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  4. Joanna Lim
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  5. Michael Fischer
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  6. Martin Schultz
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  7. Mark Gerstein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark Gerstein.

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Greenbaum, D., Douglas, S., Smith, A. et al. Computer security in academia—a potential roadblock to distributed annotation of the human genome. Nat Biotechnol 22, 771–772 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0604-771

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