EMBnet, a brief history and a current picture

The 20th anniversary of the European Molecular Biology network, EMBnet, will be celebrated at its Annual General Meeting in Martina Italy in Sept 18-20, 2008. During these years a new science, bioinformatics, has evolved and EMBnet has played an important role as a bioinformatics services for a large community of researchers. The 20th century brought us an enormous growth of knowledge in the field of life sciences. Research on nature's methods to code, store and translate genetic information into biological function resulted in huge amounts of data. The new data had to be maintained, organised and made accessible to the biomedical research community for analysis. In Europe, this was taken care of by the Data Library group (Graham Cameron, Peter Stoehr and coworkers) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg in Germany. EMBL, (www.embl.-org), the flagship of European molecular biology, was established in 1974 and is supported by at present 20 member states and one associate member.