Five years ago, Lincoln Stein, then a bioinformatician based at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, predicted that bioinformatics would cease to exist as a separate discipline within ten years. He envisioned that it would inevitably be absorbed into other biological disciplines that would increasingly take computational tools and methods for granted.

At the midway point on his timeline, Dr Stein, now head of the Informatics and Biocomputing Platform at Ontario’s Institute for Cancer Research, reassesses his prediction in a thought-provoking opinion piece for Genome Biology. He was half right, he concludes – bioinformatics has certainly become all pervading. But somewhat to his surprise, it remains stronger than ever as a field in its own right.  Read more…