Origins of bioinformatics
From Bioinformatics.Org Wiki
The origins of bioinformatics are disputed.
From T.K. Attwood and D.J. Parry-Smith's Introduction to Bioinformatics, Prentice-Hall 1999 (Longman Higher Education; ISBN 0582327881):
"The term bioinformatics is used to encompass almost all computer applications in biological sciences, but was originally coined in the mid-1980s for the analysis of biological sequence data."
From Mark S. Boguski's article in the "Trends Guide to Bioinformatics" Elsevier, Trends Supplement 1998 p1:
"The term "bioinformatics" is a relatively recent invention, not appearing in the literature until 1991 and then only in the context of the emergence of electronic publishing... "...However, some of my role models when I was a graduate student (Margaret O. Dayhoff, Russell F. Doolittle, Walter M. Fitch and Andrew D. McLachlan) had been building databases, developing algorithms and making biological discoveries by sequence analysis since the 1960s---long before anyone thought to label this activity with a special term (if anything it was called `molecular evolution'). Even a relatively new kid on the block, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, having been written into existence by US Congressman Claude Pepper and President Ronald Reagan in 1988. So bioinformatics has, in fact, been in existence for more than 30 years and is now middle-aged."
