I slipped into bioinformatics through the back door. In 1992, while completing my pathology residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, I became frustrated with my inability to combine my love of biological research with my hobby of tinkering with computers and developing software. So when I was offered the opportunity to spend a summer working with the software group at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, I jumped at it.
I joined the field of bioinformatics just a year after the term first appeared in the published literature (though people had been doing computational sequence analysis for many years by then), and I have watched it grow from an esoteric research niche to a core discipline that biologists cannot conceivably do without.
The early bioinformatics databases emphasized primary data capture. GenBank, established in the late 1980s, began with staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory (and later the ...
