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The Embarrassing, Destructive Fight over Biotech's Big Breakthrough

STEPHEN S. HALL | February 4, 2016

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A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young scientists to dinner with Thomas Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist. As they stood outside Perkins’s magnificent mansion in Marin County, with its swimming pool and garden and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Swanson turned to his two young colleagues and said, This is what we’re all working for.

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The BioPerl Project is an open-source, non-profit bioinformatics software development effort begun in 1995. BioPerl is a mature toolkit written in Perl, developed by dozens of unpaid contributors, and used by thousands of bioinformatics researchers worldwide to perform complex computing tasks involving biological sequence analysis, database development and maintenance, and public/private data interoperability. The BioPerl Project is part of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (http://www.open-bio.org), which federates the Bio* projects: BioJava, BioLib, BioPython, BioRuby, BioSQL, along with other well-known toolkits and applications.

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