BLAST

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2012 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

xi

Foreword

Reading a book such as this brings home how much BLAST—now in its teenage

years—has grown, and provides an occasion for fond reflection. BLAST was born in the

first months of 1989 at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The

Center had been created at the National Institutes of Health in November 1988, by an

act of the U.S. Congress, to foster the development of a field that then had no widely

accepted name, but which has since come to be known as “Bioinformatics.” In early

1989, David Lipman, my post-doctoral advisor, who at the time was perhaps best

known as a codeveloper of the FASTA program, was appointed director of NCBI. On

the first of March we moved into new offices at the National Library of Medicine.The

NCBI was small, but had large ambitions, and already a number of friends. Several of

these well-wishers made it a point to drop by for a visit. Gene Myers, a computer scien-

tist then at Arizona, arrived during a week in which Science was hyping a special-pur-

pose computer chip for sequence comparison. He and David, software partisans both,

were unimpressed and over dinner resolved to do better. Their original idea was to find

not subtle sequence similarities, but fairly obvious ones, and to do it in a flash. Gene

pursued a rigorous approach