Chemoinformatics, drug design, and systems biology.
In spite of its central role between physics and biology, chemistry has remained in a backward stateof informatics development compared to its two close relatives. Computers, public databases, andlarge collaborative projects have become the pervasive hallmark of research in physics and biology.The Human Genome Project, for instance, required collaboration among dozens if not hundreds ofscientists across the world. And the resulting human DNA sequence, as well as a wealth of otherbiological information, are available for anyone to download from public repositories on the Web suchas GenBank, Swissprot, the PDB, and PubMed. Virtually every biologist today uses publicly availabletools, such as BLAST, to search sequence databases and analyze high-throughput data. Similarobservations can be made in physics with large collaborative eﬁorts in, for instance astronomy or high-energy physics. The Web itself was born at CERN, a European consortium with over half a century ofhistory, and the world largest particle physics laboratory. In stark contrast, large collaborative eﬁortsand public databases and software are comparatively absent from chemical research.