I have a new addition to my list of favorite scientists.
There’s clever, and then there’s having a vision for future needs. It’s the second one that’s really tricky. It’s also important, since it opens up avenues of discovery that we might otherwise never see…or at the very least, that may force us to keep revising our methods over and over again to try and keep up with the data.
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff was responsible for one particularly elegant and yet stunningly important change in how we handle biological data, a change that required a vision for a future for bioinformatics well beyond what most of her peers imagined.