As chairwoman of the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics Conference, held at Stanford University last week, Vicky Markstein is trying to recruit the leading minds of computer science into what she calls “the industrial revolution of biology,” an anticipated period of discovery resulting from the analysis of genomic information.
Computer scientists will be essential for deriving useful knowledge from the large databases of genomic data that have recently become available, using bioinformatics.

Biologists say that for the academic partnership to work, computer scientists must learn more of the underlying physical science.