A 1981 news article by Roger Lewin reviewed the proposals by Botstein and others to construct genetic linkage maps using restriction fragment length polymorphisms -- a biomedical advance that some at the time viewed as significant enough to herald a "new genetics."

The importance of computation to future progress in molecular biology was also becoming increasingly apparent in the early 1980s, as suggested by a 1980 review by Thomas Gingeras and Richard Roberts in a larger special issue of Science devoted to recombinant DNA technologies. Two years later, Roger Lewin reported on the development of the genetic-sequence databases that ultimately evolved into the EMBL and GenBank repositories. "Computing is fast becoming an integral part of molecular biology, and the trend is certain to continue," he wrote. "Computer anxiety is surely past."

Jumping Genes Help Trace Inherited Diseases
Roger Lewin
Science, 13 February 1981 v. 211 (4483): 690-692
[PDF] (358K)

Steps Toward Computer Analysis of Nucleotide Sequences
Thomas R. Gingeras, Richard J. Roberts
Science, 19 September 1980, v. 209 (4463): 1322-1328
[PDF] (990K)

Long-Awaited Decision on DNA Database
Roger Lewin
Science, 27 August 1982, v. 217(4562): 817-818
[PDF] (235K)