The result is that biology in the 21st century is being transformed from a purely
laboratory-based science to an information science as well. The information includes
comprehensive global views of DNA sequence, RNA expression, protein interactions
or molecular conformations. Increasingly, biological studies begin with the study of
huge databases to help formulate specific hypotheses or design large-scale experiments.
In turn, laboratory work ends with the accumulation of massive collections
of data that must be sifted. These changes represent a dramatic shift in the biological
sciences.
One of the crucial steps in this transformation will be training a new generation
of biologists who are both computational scientists and laboratory scientists. This
major challenge requires both vision and hard work: vision to set an appropriate
agenda for the computational biologist of the future and hard work to develop a
curriculum and textbook.