Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States

摘要

Given the centrality of computers and computing to the practice of contemporary biology and the prominence accorded to computers for the futures of biomedical research and health care, the absence of accounts exploring the history of biomedical computing is striking. In Biomedical Computing, Joseph November illuminates how biology and medicine changed from "exemplars" of noncomputable research areas into models of computable problems (p. 7). Examining the history of biomedical computing in the thirty years following World War II, November compellingly argues that the adoption of computing in biomedicine was a reciprocal process: at the same time that biomedicine was "computerized," the development of computing was also powerfully shaped by biomedicine (p. 15).