The Business Machine in Biology—The Commercialization of AI in the Life Sciences

This article traces one important trajectory in the history of expert systems. Through a collaboration between Edward Feigenbaum and the geneticist Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, AI became deeply connected to the life sciences. Biology was a crucial test bed for some of Feigenbaum's systems and, in the long term, these systems had a transformative effect on biology. In particular, the work of Feigenbaum and his collaborators and students brought biology and computing together in especially powerful ways. We now take for granted that biology can be computerized—we have whole subdisciplines such as bioinformatics, biocomputing, and computational biology devoted to the task of studying life as information. The computer systems and software that Feigenbaum's lab helped to develop played an important role in establishing the possibility of these kinds of work.