Historically rich in novel, subtle, often controversial ideas, Molecular Bi- ology 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.
