Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bionet!tome.media.mit.edu!mike
From: mike@TOME.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hawley)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix
Subject: re: the bio-matrix IS model-based reasoning!
Message-ID: <8905240250.AA00727@tome.media.mit.edu>
Date: 24 May 89 05:50:48 GMT
Sender: daemon@NET.BIO.NET
Lines: 19

Brrr.  I hope you people know, we're in the middle of the AI winter
(which puts me at ground zero).  I don't want to snow on the parade,
but this fallout about first principles is making me shiver.
I have always been convinced that the most bangs for the buck, by FAR,
will come when you computerize a hundred gigabytes of biological
information and make it searchable.  Formalizing the AI of biology --
and theorizing about reasoning on biological principles -- well,
I wouldn't want to point fingers or anything, but at this stage I
would much rather work with a few dozen system experts than a few
dozen expert systems.  More fun, too.

So what will it take to siphon mainstream biological literature
into useful computer form?  Perhaps there is some way I can help.
I think I may have been the first person ever to "grep" the Origin
of Species, and I would sure like to catalyze the computerization
of biological literature and journals somehow.  I would like to
do nothing better than twist Steve Jobs' arm to this end.

Mike Hawley