A Brief History of Bioinformatics Software

Ella Watkins-Dulaney for Asimov Press.This essay will appear in our forthcoming book, “Making the Modern Laboratory.”When protein sequencing was invented in the late 1950s, biologists found themselves faced with the enormous task of managing and analyzing long strings of apparently random amino acids. The difficulty was that most humans can only remember a string of random values around seven items long, which is 67 times shorter than the average protein sequence. Fortunately, scientists’ growin...