UNLESS biologists and their computers learn to speak a whole new language,
much of the useful information in the human genome sequence announced last week
will go to waste, researchers said at the Beyond Genome 2000 meeting in San
Francisco last month. To deal with this problem, some experts are calling for
new computing standards reminiscent of those that created the World Wide
Web.
Biologists are already drowning in floods of genetic data, says Eric Neumann
of 3rd Millennium, a Massachusetts-based bioinformatics company. Apart from the
3 billion DNA letters of our chromosomes, efforts to record gene expression
patterns in…
