A Brief History of Bioinformatics Software

How computer scientists on the fringes of biology made sense of sequencing data.

The Column A Brief History of Bioinformatics Software How computer scientists on the fringes of biology made sense of sequencing data. Asimov Press and Ella Watkins-Dulaney Apr 07, 2026 89 6 11 Share Article voiceover 0:00 -15:19 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ella Watkins-Dulaney for Asimov Press. This essay will appear in our forthcoming book, “Making the Modern Laboratory.” When protein sequencing was invented in the late 1950s, biologists found themselves faced with the enormous task of managing and analyzing long strings of apparently random amino acids.

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