The Bioinformatics Gold Rush A $300-million industry has emerged around turning raw genome data into knowledge for making new drugs By Ken Howard Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/2000/0700issue/0700howard.html When a family friend whispered this word to Dustin Hoffman's character in the 1967 film The Graduate, he was advocating not just a novel career choice but an entirely different way of life. If that movie were made today, in the age of the deciphering of the human genome, the magic word might well be "bioinformatics." Corporate and government-led scientists have already compiled the three gigabytes of paired A's, C's, T's and G's that spell out the human genetic code--a quantity of information that could fill more than 2,000 standard computer diskettes. But that is just the initial trickle of the flood of information to be tapped from the human genome. Researchers are generating gigantic databases containing the details of when and in which tissues of the body various genes are turned on, the shapes of the proteins the genes encode, how the proteins interact with one another and the role those interactions play in disease. Add to the mix the data pouring in about the genomes of so-called model organisms such as fruit flies and mice, and you have what Gene Myers, Jr., vice president of informatics research at Celera Genomics in Rockville, Md., calls "a tsunami of information." The new discipline of bioinformatics--a marriage between computer science and biology--seeks to make sense of it all. In so doing, it is destined to change the face of biomedicine.