Computer Science Department Colloquium Series
Title:
Computation in Biology - New Opportunities and Old Pitfalls
Speaker:
- Craig J. Benham
- Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Place:
- Room 105 (Small Auditorium)
- Computer Science Building
- Princeton University
Time:
- 4:00 PM (Tea reception at 3:00 pm in the Tea Room (Second Floor)
- Wednesday, November 29, 1995
Abstract:
Biology is a science that periodically reinvents itself through the
development of revolutionary new methodologies and perspectives. The
discovery by Watson and Crick of the linear encoding of genetic information
in molecular sequences gave rise to the current revolution, in which the
fundamental determinants of many important biological phenomena are seen to
be molecular in nature. This revolutionary new perspective, largely developed
by renegade physicists, brings biology into the realm of the traditional
"hard" sciences - physics, chemistry and mathematics. It also vastly
increases the roles of theory, and more recently information science, in
biology. These developments provide major new opportunities for computer
scientists to contribute, both because the physical and theoretical
perspectives are so new and because few biologists have been trained in them.
This talk will describe one point of view on the opportunities and pitfalls
facing a computer scientist who wishes to work on new biological problems.
The cultural perspective from which biologists view their domain will be
described. The relative importance of different types of computational tools
in biology will be examined. Several new directions will be described that
are becoming accessible through the emergence of new types of biological
information. Examples will be given of problems which could form the cores
of strong, multi-decade research programs in several areas of emerging
importance in biology.
Document last modified on November 13, 1995