Who invented Bioinformatics? And how? F.P. Appio DESTEC March 27, 2015

Who was at the beginning of the field? Jim Ostell : MSc in Zoology, University of Massachusetts. 1972: collector of live materials for a biological supply house. 1976: going back to school. MSc thesis describing the anatomy and late-stage development of the male cricket accessory gland. I had no plans for what my career goal after graduate school might be. While I do not necessarily recommend this as a career strategy, I felt tremendous freedom to pursue any avenue that looked interesting to me. BIG QUESTION: HOW ALL THIS COMPLEXITY COULD ARISE FROM SUCH A SIMPLE BEGINNING? His MSc adviser: ‘Look into the new field of molecular biology for an answer by pursuing a Ph.D.’ 1979: began his doctoral studies in the laboratory of Kafatos in Harvard’s Department of Cellular and Development Biology. He begun to experiment with MOLGEN system for analyzing his sequences. He found the tools it provided unsatisfactory for his purposes. As a result, he began to write his own sequence analysis software in FORTRAN. 1982: Ostell’s colleague soon began asking to use his programs. When he published a description of the programs in Nucleic Acids Research, offering free copies to anyone who wanted it, he was overwhelmed with requests. Ostell’s programs constituted one of the most complete software packages available for molecular biology and the only one that would function on a microcomputer. However, not everyone shared his view, including some members of Ostell’s PhD committee at Harvard. “It wasn’t something that biologists should be doing,” according to the reaction of some members of his committee. Ostell could not get his PhD. 1984: Ostell was approached by International Biotechnologies, Inc. (IBI), which wanted to license his software and develop it into a product. Since Ostell had done the work while a graduate student at Harvard, the university had a legal claim to the intellectual property rights. But it saw no commercial value in Ostell’s work and agreed to sign over all rights. The IBI/Pustell Sequence Analysis Package was release in August 1984, ready to use on an IBM personal computer, at a cost of $800 for academic and commercial users. In the meanwhile, Ostell embarked on applying his software to various biological problems, resulting in significant success. 1987: Ostell’s committee allowed him to submit his thesis. Phd in Molecular Biology at Harvard University. 1988: Selling the rights to his software so as not to create a conflict of interest, Ostell began to work at the NCBI in November as the chief of information engineering. 2007: Dr. Ostell was inducted into the United States National Academies, Institute of Medicine. 2011: Dr. Ostell made an NIH Distinguished Investigator. Currently: Dr. Ostell is the Chief of the Information Engineering Branch (IEB) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). He has been responsible for designing, developing, building, and deploying almost all production resources at NCBI from its beginning including PubMed, GenBank, BLAST, Entrez, RefSeq, dbSNP, PubMed Central, dbGaP, and many others.