Biological and biomedical sciences are becoming more interdisciplinary, and scientists of the future need inte rdisciplinary training instead of the conventional disciplinary training. Just as Sean Eddy (2005) wiselypointed out that sending monolingual diplomats to the United Nations maynot enhance international collaborations, combining strictly disciplinary scientists trained in either mathematics, computational science or molecular biology will not create a productive inte rdisciplinary team ready to solve interdisciplinary problems. Molecular biology is an interdiscip linary science back in its heyday, and founders of molecular biology were ofte n interdisciplinary scientists. Indeed, Francis Crick considered himself as "a mixture of crystallographer, biophysicist, biochemist, and geneticist" (Crick, 1965). Because it was too cumbersome to explain to people that he was such a mixture, the term "molecular biologist" came handy. To get the crystallographer, biophysicist, biochemist,and geneticist within hi mself to collaborate with each other probably worked better than a team with a crystallographer, a biophysicist, a biochemist and a geneticist who maynot even be interested in each other's problems.
From the reviews: "In this book the author makes an 'effort to render both mathematical equations and biology to numbers'. ... he works out a lot of illustrative examples to make biologists understand the mathematics and computational scientists understand the biology of a wide range of problems in bioinformatics. ... The book is addressed to graduate students majoring in sciences and software engineering. Biologists with a sound knowledge of computer programming should be able to implement the presented algorithms in their own programs." (Wiebke Werft, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1166, 2009)