Specifically, those countries who best know how to correlate, analyze, and communicate biological information will be in the leading position to achieve economic and scientific advances. In so doing, he echoed many of the speakers in the Conference. The program at the University of Pennsylvania in 'Bioinformatics' teaches students at various levels of expertise about the sorts of software that are available and that are needed to analyze biological information at the gene and chromosome levels of biological organization. His remarks were echoed by other speakers, many of whom paid tribute to the foresight of the Australian Academy in having organized this meeting. It was a conference unique among other, similarly titled meetings, because it included biodiversity, environmental, and medical informatics, as well as neuroinformatics, molecular informatics, genomics, and informatics training all in one discussion.
Life is characterized by individuality, historicity, contingency, and a high information content.
There is no law of large numbers. Every living thing is truly unique. So says Dr Robert Robbins, Vice President for Information Technology of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Conference participants came away with the realization that they had been exposed to a much wider biological world than that they had previously known. Biodiversity informatics seeks to provide data not only on individual species but also on the environmental conditions favored by each species as well as the pharmaceutical or other value that a species might provide to the economy.