The entire human genome and DNA sequences will be freely accessible via computer networks and the Internet by the end of the year 2003, according to the Human Genome Project's time line. In fact, many databases containing early results of the Human Genome Project are already on the Web, such as the Human Gene Mutation Database at the Institute of Medical Genetics in Cardiff. Informatics is the science of creating and developing databases, as well as data interpretation software tools, for widespread use. Some of this data, as well as data-mining tools, will head to the Internet. Building the Biochip New software tools and databases aren't the only computing technologies that will help catalog the results of the Genome Project.
Hardware plays a role, too.
Motorola, for example, is working with the U.S. government's Argonne National Laboratory to mass-produce biochips, which are similar to semiconductors. Like the semiconductor chip in your PC, which is designed to crunch millions of numbers in a split second, biochips can crunch millions of biological reactions in a split second. Biochips incorporate tens of thousands of microscopic structures into a glass surface about the size of a glass slide that you would put under a microscope. Each microscopic structure functions like a tiny test tube. The bottom line is that the biochips can test such interactions much more rapidly than human beings armed with individual test tubes can.