Wednesday Geek Woman: Margaret Dayhoff, quantum chemist and bioinfomaticist
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L:
November 30th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Crick and Watson (and those other people)
By which you mean Rosalind Franklin, right?
Matthew Garrett:
November 30th, 2011 at 8:42 am
And Maurice Wilkins. The fame didn’t manage to attach itself to everyone involved.
Ingrid Jakobsen:
December 2nd, 2011 at 4:12 am
I was certainly aware there was someone in early bioinformatics called Dayhoff (Dayhoff protein substitution matrices were a part of my life at one point) but I think I’d missed that Dayhoff was a woman, so thanks!
G:
December 3rd, 2011 at 11:39 am
mjg59, thanks for writing this. I raised generations of fruit flies in genetics class and remember those card-sorting machines, which makes Dayhoff’s career particularly interesting to me.
Some background on those machines: EAM or ‘electrical accounting machines’ were early computers that worked by taking a stack of 80-column punch cards and processing them by sorting them into groups and recording totals. The first ones were called tabulating machines and were invented by Herman Hollerith in 1890. They continued to be sold until the 1970s and used for a while after that. I worked in one corner of a US government EAM room in 1979.
Some examples: IBM 407 and the older IBM 402. The IBM 407 cost $800/month in 1976. That’s $3,183/month in current dollars!
One of the earliest uses of computers for consumers was tracking utility payments. Each bill would be accompanied by a punch card that would be returned with the payment check so the card could be loaded into an EAM machine to process the payment. The cards were always labeled ‘Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate’. Bar codes are a lot easier.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane.