Imagine biology and medicine today without computers. What would laboratory work be like if electronic databases and statistical software did not exist? Would disciplines like genomics even be feasible if we lacked the means to manage and manipulate huge volumes of digital data? How would patients fare in a world absent CT scans, programmable pacemakers, and computerized medical records? Today, computers are a critical component of almost all research in biology and medicine.

Yet, just fifty years ago, the study of life was by far the least digitized field of science, its living subject matter thought too complex and dynamic to be meaningfully analyzed by logic-driven computers.