These pages contain various materials for the course BIOL721.
Brian Golding
Department of Biology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ont.,
L8S 4K1
Towards a paradigm shift in biology
W. Gilbert NATURE 349:99 1991.
For 15 years, the DNA databases have grown by 60 per cent a year, a factor of ten every five years. The human genome project will continue and accelerate this rate of increase. Thus I expect that sequence data for all of the model organisms and half of the total knowledge of the human organism will be available in five to seven years, and all of it by the end of the decade.
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To use this flood of knowledge, which will pour across the computer networks of the world, biologists not only must become computer-literate, but also change their approach to the problem of understanding life.
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