Computational Biology: Moving into the Future One Click at a Time

Philip Bourne (Fig 1) began his scientific career in the wet lab, like many of his computational biology contemporaries. He earned his PhD in physical chemistry from the Flinders University of South Australia and pursued postdoctoral training at the University of Sheffield, where he began studying protein structure. Bourne accepted his first academic position in 1995 in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), rose to the rank of professor, and was associate vice chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances of the Office of Research Affairs. During his time at UCSD, he built a broad research program that used bioinformatics and systems biology to examine protein structure and function, evolution, drug discovery, disease, and immunology. Bourne also developed the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank (PDB) and Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), which have become valuable data resources for the research community. In 2014, Bourne accepted the newly created position of associate director for data science (ADDS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has been tasked with leading an NIH-wide initiative to better utilize the vast and growing collections of biomedical data in more effective and innovative ways. Bourne has been deeply involved with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) throughout his career and is the founding editor-in-chief (EIC) of PLOS Computational Biology, an official journal of ISCB. He has been a firm believer in open access to scientific literature and the effective dissemination of data and results, for which PLOS Computational Biology is an exemplary model. Bourne believes that open access is more than just the ability to read free articles, and he said, “The future is using this content in really effective ways.”He referenced an article he cowrote with J. Lynn Fink and Mark Gerstein in 2008, titled “Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content,” which argued that the full potential of open access has not been realized, as “no killer apps” exist that troll the literature and cross-reference other databases to come up with new discoveries [1]. Bourne believes that the scientific