UNDERSTANDING THE ROOTS OF BIOINFORMATICS:

Every new scientific or methodology reaches a point in its maturation where it’s fruitful for it to turn
its gaze inward, as well as backward. Such introspection helps to clarify the essential structure of a
field of study, facilitating communication, pedagogy,standardization and the like, while retrospection
aids this process by accounting for its beginning and underpinnings.

THE NATURE OF BIOINFORMATICS

Many who draw a distinction between bioinformatics and computational biology portray the former
as a tool kit and the latter as science. All would allow that the science informs the tools and the tools
enable the science.bioinformatics broadly, expected to have a dual nature. This duality echoes
between EPISTEME(scientific ) and TECHNE(know how, in the sense of technology). The power of
bioinformatics might be seen as arising from their harmonious combination, in the Greek
tradition,lending it emergent capabilities beyond the simple intersection of computers and biology.

A BIOINFORMATICS REVOLUTION

If there has been one, was it a revolution in techne, like the Industrial Revolution or in episteme, like
the scientific revolution or was both? The former suggests quantum leaps in scale and capability
through automation, which seems to apply to bioinformatics almost by definition, while the latter
implies an actual shift in worldview,raising a more philosophical question.whether it’s rapid uptake
and substantial impact qualify it as a technological revolution or merely an evolutionary saltation, is
perhaps only a matter of semantics.A Computational perspective may radically change attitudes
toward data, or even models of data, but it seems unlikely to fundamentally alter our sense of reality
in the domain of biology.

THE ROLE OF TOOLS

The hardening of biology in the 20th century involved a reductionist convergence with chemistry and
physics, enhanced by improving instrumentation, as well as quantitative. Computers, with the
notorious literal mindedness, required the same sort of tightening up of descriptive language and
have promoted ever more explicitly operational definitions, in terms of the biological operations
applied to DNA sequences. The practice predated but has lately been reinforced by bioinformatics.
Today operational definitions of biological concepts such as gene and pathway, distinguished as to
Wether they are probed by methods genetic,biochemical or biophysical are providing new insights as
they are similarly integrated, with appropriate caution by bioinformatics methods.

THE BIOINFORMATIC SYNTHESIS

The most salient feature of the development of bioinformatics has been its success as an
interdisciplinary enterprise. Happily,as with the mutual stimulation between biological taxonomy and
computational classification methods, the subsequent history of bioinformatics took a decidedly
more syncretic turn,often as a result of felicitous collaborations.