Profiles in Computer Science Courage Part I: Reflections on the rewards of plunging into biomedicine
Interviews with Leonidas Guibas, Ron Shamir, Michael Black, David Haussler, Daphne Koller, Erin Halperin, Gene Myers, Paul Groth and Bruce Donald
To a computer scientist, the fields of biology and medicine can seem like the vast Pacific Ocean, says Leonidas Guibas, PhD, professor of computer science at Stanford University. “You go to the...
Apr, 01, 2011
A virtual metabolic network represents intracellular traffic
It’s hard to imagine a map depicting the daily flow of traffic on water, wheels and foot throughout San Diego—or any large city—over the course of a day. “That map can...
Apr, 01, 2007
Computation offers a window into a disease often described as a black box
The growing threats of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) are spurring worldwide interest in faster and more innovative research approaches, such as...
Jun, 06, 2012
They're more than just pretty pictures adorning office walls and presentation slides. Beamed into operating room computer monitors, they're guiding the scalpels of brain surgeons. Dancing...
Jan, 01, 2012
New approaches extend multiscale models to represent cellular mesoscales and bridge from molecular to cellular models
In an era of increasingly comprehensive molecular characterizations of living systems, computation has emerged as a key technology to facilitate integrative understanding of biological mechanisms....
Feb, 19, 2013
Computer model supports one theory of why sex is such a good idea
Sex is a costly undertaking. Finding partners takes time and energy. Sexual contact can transmit disease. And if reproductive success is measured by how many genes you pass on, females would be...
Jul, 01, 2007
Helping newcomers understand the lay of the land
As a program manager in biomedical computing and computational biology at the National Institutes of Health, I field many questions, particularly from new investigators. They ask questions like:...
Apr, 01, 2010
Researcher coaxes long strands of DNA into predetermined geometric shapes
Designing nanostructures of DNA just got easier. Paul Rothemund, PhD, a senior research fellow at Caltech has found a way to coax a long strand of DNA into a predetermined geometric shape by mixing...
Jul, 01, 2006
In a classic cartoon, a physician offers a second opinion from his computer. The patient looks horrified: How absurd to think that a computer could have better judgment than a human doctor! But...
Jan, 01, 2010
Decades of steady progress in pharmacogenetics have unearthed hundreds of associations between genes and drug response. But the field has to solve some theoretical and practical issues before it can deliver on the promise of personalized drug therapy.
As algorithms go, it’s deceptively simple. Just add together eight weighted pieces of patient information—age, height, weight, race, data about two genes, and a pair of clinical...
Jul, 01, 2009