A Means to an End

"These days, computers are a means to an end rather than an end in themselves," says Bill Young, associate director of Research Computing. "Much of the science at the institute—proteomics, mass spectrometry, data processing, virtual chemistry—depends on computers."

For example, massive parallel data processing was needed to create this image from the Asturias lab, an 11-angstrom-resolution structure of human RNA polymerse II, the enzyme responsible for transcription of all protein-enconding human genes. The structure was calculated from about 45,000 images of individual polymerase particles. (Image by John Craighead and Francisco Asturias.)