Bioinformatics in medical practice
As scientific disciplines grow and develop new methods of investigation and enter new areas of inquiry, the changes that follow sometimes lead to the definition of a new field. The process is not an orderly one; there is no moment of birth for a new scientific discipline. The unifying concepts are changing as rapidly as they are defined. The boundaries resemble those of eighteenth-century Europe more than twentieth-century America, with frequent changes, annexations, rebellions, and secessions. It is in this state that we find the field of “bioinformatics.” Derived from the French term bioinformatique (computer science for biological data), it encompasses, at times, complex analytic techniques for large amounts of data in genomics and proteomics and large database analysis of clinical data collected from insurance companies. Bioinformatic investigations may be as abstract as the development of theoretical models and neural networks or as concrete as defining the structure of DNA. They may look at populations as large as that of the world or as small as the DNA of a single organism. To quote from a definition promulgated by the National Institutes of Health: