1. Information Technology in the Natural Sciences Biology – Chemistry – Physics

2. 2 Historical Perspective Information Technology in Business Starting in the 60’s VisiCalc 1979 first commercial Spreadsheet program Business applications have been the driving force behind the rapid development of IT over the last 30 years.

3. 3 Huge Amounts of Information Business Information Wall Street produces Terabytes of data every day Wal-Mart Alone has an operational database with many Terabytes of data Scientific Information From Stars in the Universe Amino Acids in our bodies Scientific Data about the Natural World is far larger than any Business Application could produce.

4. 4 Computational Science Use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve scientific problems. – Computational Biology (Bioinformatics) – Computational Chemistry – Computational Physics – Computer Modeling and Simulation of the Natural World

5. 5 Bioinformatics Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment,sequence alignment gene finding,gene finding protein structure alignment,protein structure alignment protein structure prediction,protein structure prediction prediction of gene expressiongene expression protein-protein interactions, andprotein-protein interactions the modeling of evolution.evolution

6. 6 Bioinformatics continued... Computers were used out of necessity because In the Human Genome Project there is too much data to process manually Data Mining techniques can discover patterns and relationships that human couldn’t find.

7. 7 Computational Chemistry create efficient mathematical approximations and computer programs that calculate the approximationscomputer programs properties of molecules andmolecules to apply these programs to concrete chemical objects. Heavy use of Visualization, 3D Modeling and even Virtual Reality.

8. 8 Computational Physics study and implementation of numerical algorithms in order to solve problems in physicsalgorithmsphysics In the past, computers weren’t powerful enough to complete the computation of serious problems.

9. 9 How will this change the world? It already has... The human genome could never have been sequences without the aid of Information Technology. But, this is just the beginning... The Pharmaceutical Industry is changing rapidly.

10. 10 Drug Discovery The process by which drugs are designed and discovered is changing. Diseases can be pin pointed to certain genes and/or proteins. Instead of serendipitous discovery, drugs can betailor designed to repair or correct specific problems on a molecular level.serendipitous

11. 11 Scary or Hopeful Considerations The wide use a Information Technology in Science is rather new. Its just about to explode. Scientists may not be leveraging the full advantages of IT. The tools for manipulating data advance much more rapidly than physical tools (instruments, etc.)