IBEST - about - the beginning

“Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Nichomachean Ethics

ln 1993, at a general, public, University of Idaho faculty meeting, a young and foolish (that is, “loud” and ”untenured") Assistant Professor in Computer Science rebuked his elders. The discussion was about whether it was sufficient to be excellent in teaching or research, without being excellent in the other as well. The young professor said that in general one was either excellent in both, or in neither, and that those who thought they were exceptions were fooling themselves (and no one else). The young faculty member was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, but had a background in philosophy and so enjoyed a good, bare knuckled intellectual “discussion”. After that meeting, a wiser, older faculty member, an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences, introduced herself to the youngster and said in effect “Amen! Let's do some research and teaching together!”. At about the same time, a distinguished elderly gentleman introduced himself to the pair. His training was in physics. He and his wife were active at Los Alamos during the Manhattan project, and he had an impressive career before his retirement. He wanted to learn everything he could about biology, because he considered the issues to be deeply philosophically important. This group began meeting for lunch and discussion, calling themselves the “Computational Biology Seminar” (in 1993, long before that was fashionable).

The young faculty member was James A. Foster (upper right), the wiser biologist was Holly Wichman (upper left), and the distinguished couple were Millie and Larry Johnston, (bottom row). Other friends have joined us from time to time, and some have moved on to other things. But we have continued to have lunch and discussion weekly since 1993. Discussion and dining — that was the birth of IBEST.

We decided we needed to choose a common research project. In a typically IBEST-ian administrative move, we decided to have a picnic. After the picnic, we retired to the hot tub with a nice bottle of OBAN single malt scotch. At one point, Holly sat up and said “I know! Let’s...” and our first research project was off and running. The first publication together, in 1995, had as authors an undergraduate student and faculty members from both Biological Sciences and Computer Sciences. We were now a genuine research team.

In 1999 Foster (the computer scientist) received funding to do a sabbatical in Wichman’s (the biologist) lab. Their thinking was that nothing could be more fun that close friends doing good science together. During that sabbatical, they decided to form IBEST, the Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary STudies, as an excuse for people who enjoyed each other’s company to meet, eat, discuss, and do good science. Hence IBEST was born, with the explicit mission to have fun by doing good science. Since then, IBEST has grown to include faculty from several colleges and departments, with diverse interests. We meet at least once a week for lunch and fun (aka “good science”), and we all work together as scientists, scholars, and friends.

There is a great deal of excellence in both research and education in this group. There are also some of the best students, staff, and postdocs one could hope to find anywhere. Our administrators love our faculty because we bring in lots of grant money, publish significant and numerous papers, and graduate some of the best students anywhere. But our dirty little secret is that IBEST people work together because WE LIKE TO.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!), but
“That’s funny ...”

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

James grew up in a small trailer home in Kansas, and so is not afraid of much. He received an A.B. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1981, where he did a dissertation with extensive translation and interpretation of the pre-Socratic philosophy Herakleitos. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Illinois Institute of Technology (in 1986 and 1990 respectively), where he did research in alternative logics and computational complexity theory.

He joined the University of Idaho in 1990, and has been promoted and tenured, despite occasional outbursts (see above) to the rank of Professor. He is currently the director of the UI graduate program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and director of the state-wide Bioinformatics Core facilities. He is incurably addicted to interdisciplinary conversations and activities. His current research interests are in evolutionary computation, improved algorithms for multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic inferencing, microbial ecology, evolvable hardware, and several other things. In his spare time he still enjoys reading the classics and fishing.