Bioinformatics ? Biology and Computers ? What do they have to do with each other? I suppose that this question could have been raised even in 19th century when technologies of computers and biology were just emerging. At one city in France the great Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was studying how fermentation of alcohol was linked to the existence of a specific microorganism. In another city in England, equally great Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was oiling his Analytical Engine in which Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who understood Babbage's vision, was trying to calculate the Bernoulli numbers. These gentlemen are today hailed as father of biotechnology and father of computers respectively | Achuthsankar S. Nair Computational Biology Bioinformatics- A Gentle Overview Communications of the Computer Society of India January 2007. Computational Biology Bioinformatics A Gentle Overview Achuthsankar S Nair Extracts from my Guest Editorial of Communications of Computer Society of India Jan 2007. B oinformatics Biology and Computers What do they have to do with each other I suppose that this question could have been raised even in 19th century when technologies of computers and biology were just emerging. At one city in France the great Louis Pasteur 1822-1895 was studying how fermentation of alcohol was linked to the existence of a specific microorganism. In another city in England equally great Charles Babbage 1791-1871 was oiling his Analytical Engine in which Ada Lovelace a mathematician who understood Babbage s vision was trying to calculate the Bernoulli numbers. These gentlemen are today hailed as father of biotechnology and father of computers respectively. Did Pasteur and Babbage ever meet They had about 25 years to do so and were less than 1000 Km apart. We do not know if they ever met but had they met they possibly would not have talked to each other If I may be pardoned for a politically incorrect pun remember that Pasteur was French and Babbage was British . Anyway what do they have in common to talk other than the weather What is there in common between the gear wheels that were turning away in an attempt to crunch numbers and the microbes playing mysterious role in fermenting alcohol Is this true today Not a bit not even as much as a bacteria. It seems imminent if not already true that Biology and Computers are becoming close cousins which are mutually respecting helping and influencing each other and synergistically merging more than ever. The flood of data from Biology mainly in the form of DNA RNA and Protein sequences is putting heavy demand on computers and computational scientists. At the same time it is demanding a transformation of .
