Historically rich in novel, subtle, often controversial ideas, Molecular Biology has lately become heir to a huge legacy of standardized data in the
form of polynucleotide and polypeptide sequences. Fred Sanger received
two, well deserved Nobel Prizes for his seminal role in developing the basic
technology needed for this reduction of core biological information to one
linear dimension. With the explosion of recorded information, biochemists
for the first time found it necessary to familiarize themselves with databases
and the algorithms needed to extract the correlations of records, and in turn
have put these to good use in the exploration of phylogenetic relationships,
and in the applied tasks of hunting genes and their often valuable products.
The formalization of this research challenge in the Human Genome Project has generated a new impetus in datasets to be analyzed and the funds to support that research.
