By Libby Rosof Picture an attic filled with stuff you're convinced you will need some day. Now picture a mountain range of scientific data piled up in pretty much the same way most folks stuff their attics. For the last 20 years, scientific data has been piling up in much that way. Critical information and discoveries biologists are eager to build on are buried in databases they cannot negotiate.
Help is here.
Here at Penn. It's interdisciplinary and it's a new center, the Center for Bioinformatics. They were creating programs to help scientists find and manage information, and they were running a seminar series that was attracting people from beyond Penn's ivied walls. Some of the programs they were designing enable databases and computers to communicate with one another. Some enable scientists to visualize biological structures by transforming data normally expressed in long strings of characters into still and moving pictures.