MOLGEN is an expert
system that helped molecular scientists and geneticists plan studies between
1975 and 1980.
It was Edward Feigenbaum's Heuristic Programming Project
(HPP) at Stanford University's third expert system (after DENDRAL and MYCIN).
MOLGEN, like MYCIN before it, attracted hundreds of users
outside of Stanford.
MOLGEN was originally made accessible to artificial
intelligence researchers, molecular biologists, and geneticists via
time-sharing on the GENET network in the 1980s.
Feigenbaum founded IntelliCorp in the late 1980s to offer a
stand-alone software version of MOLGEN.
Scientific advancements in chromosomes and genes sparked an
information boom in the early 1970s.
In 1971, Stanford University scientist Paul Berg performed
the first gene splicing studies.
Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen and University of
California at San Francisco biochemist Herbert Boyer succeeded in inserting
recombinant DNA into an organ ism two years later; the host organism (a
bacterium) subsequently spontaneously replicated the foreign rDNA structure in
its progeny.
Because of these developments, Stanford molecular researcher
Joshua Lederberg told Feigenbaum that now was the right time to construct an
expert system in Lederberg's expertise of molecular biology.
(Lederberg and Feigenbaum previously collaborated on DENDRAL,
the first expert system.) MOLGEN could accomplish for recombinant DNA research
and genetic engineering what DENDRAL had done for mass spectrometry, the two
agreed.
Both expert systems were created with developing scientific
topics in mind.
This enabled MOL GEN (and DENRAL) to absorb the most
up-to-date scientific information and contribute to the advancement of their
respective fields.
Mark Stefik and Peter Friedland developed programs for
MOLGEN as their thesis project at HPP, and Feigenbaum was the primary
investigator.
MOLGEN was supposed to follow a "skeletal
blueprint" (Friedland and Iwasaki 1985, 161).
MOLGEN prepared a new experiment in the manner of a human
expert, beginning with a design approach that had previously proven effective
for a comparable issue.
MOLGEN then made hierarchical, step-by-step changes to the
plan.
The algorithm was able to choose the most promising new
experiments because to the combination of skeleton blueprints and MOLGEN's
enormous knowledge base in molecular biology.
MOLGEN contained 300 lab procedures and strategies, as well
as current data on forty genes, phages, plasmids, and nucleic acid structures,
by 1980.
Fried reich and Stefik presented MOLGEN with a set of
algorithms based on the molecular biology knowledge of Stanford University's
Douglas Brutlag, Larry Kedes, John Sninsky, and Rosalind Grymes.
SEQ (for nucleic acid sequence analysis), GA1 (for
generating enzyme maps of DNA structures), and SAFE were among them (for
selecting enzymes most suit able for gene excision).
Beginning in February 1980, MOLGEN was made available to the
molecular biology community outside of Stanford.
Under an account named GENET, the system was linked to SUMEX
AIM (Stanford University Medical Experimental Computer for Artificial
Intelligence in Medicine).
GENET was able to swiftly locate hundreds of users around
the United States.
Academic scholars, experts from commercial giants like
Monsanto, and researchers from modest start-ups like Genentech were among the
frequent visitors.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was SUMEX
AIM's primary supporter, finally concluded that business customers could not
have unfettered access to cutting-edge technology produced with public funds.
Instead, the National Institutes of Health encouraged
Feigenbaum, Brutlag, Kedes, and Friedland to form IntelliGenetics, a company
that caters to business biotech customers.
IntelliGenetics created BIONET with the support of a $5.6
million NIH grant over five years to sell or rent MOLGEN and other GENET
applications.
For a $400 yearly charge, 900 labs throughout the globe had
access to BIONET by the end of the 1980s.
Companies who did not wish to put their data on BIONET might
purchase a software package from IntelliGenetics.
Until the mid-1980s, when IntelliGenetics withdrew its
genetics material and maintained solely its underlying Knowledge Engineering
Environment, MOLGEN's software did not sell well as a stand-alone product
(KEE).
IntelliGenetics' AI division, which marketed the new KEE
shell, changed its name to IntelliCorp.
Two more public offerings followed, but growth finally
slowed.
MOLGEN's shell's commercial success, according to
Feigenbaum, was hampered by its LISP-language; although LISP was chosen by
pioneering computer scientists working on mainframe computers, it did not
inspire the same level of interest in the corporate minicomputer sector.
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See also:
DENDRAL; Expert Systems; Knowledge Engineering.
References & Further Reading:
Feigenbaum, Edward. 2000. Oral History. Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute.
Friedland, Peter E., and Yumi Iwasaki. 1985. “The Concept and Implementation of Skeletal Plans.” Journal of Automated Reasoning 1: 161–208.
Friedland, Peter E., and Laurence H. Kedes. 1985. “Discovering the Secrets of DNA.” Communications of the ACM 28 (November): 1164–85.
Lenoir, Timothy. 1998. “Shaping Biomedicine as an Information Science.” In Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on the History and Heritage of Science Information Systems, edited by Mary Ellen Bowden, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Robert V. Williams, 27–46. Pittsburgh, PA: Conference on the History and Heritage of Science Information Systems.
Watt, Peggy. 1984. “Biologists Map Genes On-Line.” InfoWorld 6, no. 19 (May 7): 43–45.
