Thanks for this spotlight on some little visited history that transformed biology. I knew many of the protagonists (although, unfortunately, not Margaret Dayhoff). During the mid-1970s, I worked with Mike Smith when he had just returned to UBC after a sabbatical with Fred Sanger. At the time, Mike himself was doing the work on in vitro mutagenesis for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1993. Mike didn’t know anything about computers except that we would need them to analyze DNA sequences. The programs whose development he promoted were written in COBOL, a business-oriented language. Neither I nor any of the other geneticists I knew could make any sense of them. Those few of us who knew anything about programming all used Fortran during the 1970s.
Thanks for this wonderful note. Michael Smith personally told me (Eric Cabot) about enlisting his brother-in-law to help assemble the ΦX174 sequence (although my recollection was that, at the time, McCallum worked for an insurance company). He also mentioned that McCallum and Staden are credited in the paper as an acknowledgement. I was glad to see mention of my former employer, GCG. GCG was a spin-off from the laboratory of Oliver Smithies, along with another former employer -- its sister company DNASTAR. I also had the pleasure of writing the first PC-based multiple sequence alignment editor which I christened "The Eyeball Sequence Editor" (ESEE) after a remark in Feng and Doolittle's paper.
Bioinformatics is truly one of the triumphs of modern science. Incredible how the field progressed in less than a century, culminating in the awarding of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for Alphafold
Thank you for the piece! I've worked with lab informatics companies but never thought to look into its history, to be honest. I kind of took it for granted, focusing on the market and looking straight ahead into the future (I worked with product marketing). It's humbling to realize what a path it took and initial skepticism around computers. It's also funny, from my experience, to acknowledge that the skepticism still persists but in different forms.
Thanks for this spotlight on some little visited history that transformed biology. I knew many of the protagonists (although, unfortunately, not Margaret Dayhoff). During the mid-1970s, I worked with Mike Smith when he had just returned to UBC after a sabbatical with Fred Sanger. At the time, Mike himself was doing the work on in vitro mutagenesis for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1993. Mike didn’t know anything about computers except that we would need them to analyze DNA sequences. The programs whose development he promoted were written in COBOL, a business-oriented language. Neither I nor any of the other geneticists I knew could make any sense of them. Those few of us who knew anything about programming all used Fortran during the 1970s.
That's a cool piece of lore.
I used to work at Michael Smith's Laboratories in Vancouver on some variant calling databases, just clicked to me where the name came from
Thanks for this wonderful note. Michael Smith personally told me (Eric Cabot) about enlisting his brother-in-law to help assemble the ΦX174 sequence (although my recollection was that, at the time, McCallum worked for an insurance company). He also mentioned that McCallum and Staden are credited in the paper as an acknowledgement. I was glad to see mention of my former employer, GCG. GCG was a spin-off from the laboratory of Oliver Smithies, along with another former employer -- its sister company DNASTAR. I also had the pleasure of writing the first PC-based multiple sequence alignment editor which I christened "The Eyeball Sequence Editor" (ESEE) after a remark in Feng and Doolittle's paper.
Bioinformatics is truly one of the triumphs of modern science. Incredible how the field progressed in less than a century, culminating in the awarding of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for Alphafold
Thank you for the piece! I've worked with lab informatics companies but never thought to look into its history, to be honest. I kind of took it for granted, focusing on the market and looking straight ahead into the future (I worked with product marketing). It's humbling to realize what a path it took and initial skepticism around computers. It's also funny, from my experience, to acknowledge that the skepticism still persists but in different forms.
Thanks for a nice walk down memory lane!