Sebastopol, CA--In his keynote address at the 2003 O'Reilly
Bioinformatics Technology Conference, Lincoln Stein predicted that the
term "bioinformatics" will be obsolete by 2012. Stein's assertion
created quite a stir among the 683 biologists, computer scientists,
software engineers, mathematicians--all bioinformaticians to varying
degrees--who attended the conference in San Diego earlier this month.
What could his prediction portend for the technical direction their
careers are taking?
Stein's presentation was just one of many thought-and debate-provoking
sessions held during the four-day conference. Stephen Wolfram,
well-known in scientific circles for his Mathematica software and his
recently released tome, "A New Kind of Science," delved into his book's
issues and their ramifications for bioinformatics in his keynote
presentation, which spilled over to an extensive question-and-answer
session following his formal talk. Just prior to his keynote talk, Jim
Kent was presented with the Benjamin Franklin Award for promoting
freedom and openness in the field of bioinformatics by J.W. Bizarro,
president of Bioinformatics.Org. Kent developed the "GigAssembler," a
10,000-line program that he wrote in a month and then used to assemble
the public human genome fragments, helping to keep the data in the
public domain and unrestricted by commercial patents.
Representatives from Sun Microsystems and the Blueprint Initiative,
part of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital
in Toronto, chose the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference to
announce that the Initiative had acquired more than $5 million in Sun
hardware, software, and storage to support the standard-setting BIND
(Biomolecular Interaction Network Database). BIND is a growing
repository of data on how the proteins that make up all life interact
and control cellular life, and will benefit researchers in
proteomics--the study of protein interactions.
Designed to bridge gaps between communities, sessions at the second
O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference appealed to academic and
industry audiences, wet lab denizens, and "chip heads" alike, exploring
topics such as interaction networks, web services, grid computation,
visualization, genomics, algorithms, pipelining and automation of data,
and building open source applications. Other speakers at the conference
included experts such as Alvis Brazma, Microarray Informatics Group
Leader, European Bioinformatics Institute; James Gosling, co-inventor
of Java, and VP and Fellow, Sun Microsystems; Francis Ouellette,
Director, University of British Columbia Bioinformatics Centre; Steven
Brenner, Assistant Professor and leader of a computational genomics
research group at the University of California, Berkeley; Damian
Conway, Research Fellow, Monash University; Nat Goodman, Senior
Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology and an
Affiliate Professor of Bioinformatics at the Arctic Region
Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska; Chris Dagdigian,
founding partner of BioTeam Inc.; and Bill Day, Staff Engineer and
Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems.
Other notable conference events included tracks planned by
Bioinformatics.Org and I3C (including the LSID specification), and a
GMOD (Generic Model Organism Database) meeting, which was open to
developers and curators of model organism system databases. Apple's
Rendezvous Lounge was stocked with a stunning assortment of its most
advanced hardware and software offerings for perusal by
conference-goers.
"We're already starting to work on next year's program," notes Lorrie
LeJeune, O'Reilly bioinformatics editor and conference program chair,
confirming the success of the 2003 O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology
Conference despite the challenging economy and its toll on the meeting
and conferences industry. "We'll be taking Lincoln Stein's keynote
advice to heart and looking toward the biology of 2012 as well as the
bioinformatics of 2004."
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