1. Bioinformatics, from the pioneers to the present day

Bioinformatics is often considered a very recent discipline, in response to the need created by the deciphering of genomes. In fact, it dates back to the emergence of the molecular vision of biology in the 1950s. From the outset, therefore, it has accompanied the very development of the computer.

It was the simultaneous development of two a priori unconnected fields - computer science and biology - that gave rise to bioinformatics, the discipline without which the explosive evolution of modern biology, into the post-genomic era, could never have taken place.

Bioinformatics is therefore the fruit of a technological coincidence and a few visionaries, battling with primitive computers as early as the 1960s. In fact, most of the basic algorithms and concepts of bioinformatics were invented before the advent of the computer as we know it today:...