As late as the early 1990s, biology and related fields required very little experience with computers. Now, however, the vast amount of data on DNA sequences and proteins generated from the Human Genome Project and from labs around the world have made it clear that biologists will have to rely more on computers to organize, store and efficiently make use of these data for analysis. Thus, from the fusion of computer science and biology, a relatively new field was born: bioinformatics, a field that holds promise for speeding up drug discovery but also faces problems as it is integrated into our society.