William Brown is Professor of Biological Sciences and former Head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests span a wide range of disciplines, but a primary focus is on understanding the relationship between structure and function, with a particular emphasis on the role of proteins. He is a recent recipient of an award for excellence in teaching from the Mellon College of Science. Professor Brown received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1971, and has been at Carnegie Mellon for 30 years. |
Chapter 11, selection: Computers in Biology:
Then to Now Where is computing taking the biological sciences at
Carnegie Mellon? It is three decades since the new biological sciences
department was formed within the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie
Mellon, and I have been here almost all of those years. Biology had been
taught in Margaret Morrison Carnegie College prior to the existence of
the Mellon College of Science, but it was a different biology. Bob Rice,
on the Carnegie Mellon faculty 1954-79, led the effort to create a new
biology department, focused on molecular biology, cell biology, genetics,
biochemistry and biophysics. The new biology has flourished, and made
a major contribution to the universitys strategic thrust in the
basic sciences and biotechnology. Central to this success was the creation
and use of new tools, dependent on computers. This chapter will provide
a personal perspective on the transforming effect of computers on research
and education in the new biology at Carnegie Mellon over the past three
decades. When I arrived at Carnegie Mellon in 1973, after a post-doctoral
fellowship at Yale, sophisticated equipment comprised things like a rotating
anode for x-ray generation that collected data on film to determine the
three dimensional structure of a protein; an ultracentrifuge that was
used to measure the mass and shape of molecules and biological complexes;
or a Cary spectrophotometer for measuring the changes in spectral properties
of proteins and DNA. These were manual devices that provided excellent
data that then required manipulation, analysis, and interpretation, which
was done by hand or using a mainframe computer. At that time, mainframe computers were used to analyze
large sets of data. Jobs were submitted to a central facility on punch
cards, and you crossed your fingers that the cards were in the right order
and that the instructions had been punched correctly. For many of us in
research, one of the great revolutions in computing came with the availability
of the Digital PDP series of computers, which allowed us to do our processing
in our own laboratories. |
Innovative University Home | Foreword | Table of Contents | Authors | Buy the Book
Carnegie Mellon Home | Carnegie Mellon Site Index
Last updated 01 November 2004.