NEWS BRIEFS

San Diego, CA — This year’s International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2000) has announced a lecture by David Searls, of SmithKline Beecham, to commemorate the work of his longtime colleague, G. Christian Overton, founding director of the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Overton, who died May 31, was well known as a pioneer of the emerging field of bioinformatics. He recognized early the potential impact of applying computational technology to the study of biological problems. In 1997, he established Penn’s Center for Bioinformatics ( http://www.pcbi.upenn.edu ), which houses the Computational Biology and Informatics Laboratory (CBIL).

ISMB 2000 is the Eighth Annual International Conference for the latest developments in bioinformatics. It will be held August 19 – 23 on the University of California campus in San Diego. Searls’s talk will included among the seven keynote addresses to be given by noted biologists, including Nobel prizewinner Gerald Edelman and Leroy Hood, another bioinformatics pioneer.

Other notable addresses include:

– Gerald Edelman, The Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla, CA How Matter Becomes Imagination: From Brain Dynamics to Consciousness

– Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA Globally Deciphering and Integrating Information Expressed by Living Organisms

– Minoru Kanehisa, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Japan Graph Comparison and Path Computation Methods for Predicting Molecular Networks from Genome Information

– J. Andrew McCammon, Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego, CA Dynamics of Molecular Recognition

– Gene Myers, Celera Genomics Corporation, Rockville, MD A Whole Genome Assembly of Drosophila and a Progress Report on the Human Genome

– Harold A. Scheraga, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, NY Ab Initio Folding of Proteins

– David B. Searls, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals Reading the Book of Life

The conference will also feature the presentations of more than 40 research papers and more than 300 posters, as well as software demonstrations, exhibits by vendors and researchers, and pre- and post-conference forums. Says Phil Bourne of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) ( http://www.sdsc.edu ), co-chair with Michael Gribskov of ISMB 2000, “This is shaping up to be a very important meeting, coming as it does immediately upon the milestone announcement by the Human Genome Project and Celera.”

For registration information and a detailed agenda of the event, please refer to the website, ( http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu ), or contact Nancy Jensen, SDSC, [email protected], 858-534-5039.

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