40 Years of Trends in Pharmacological Sciences: Blending Man and Machine

摘要

Trends in Pharmacological Sciences (TIPS) circulated its first issue 40 years ago, in 1979, and became the third journal in the Trends series following the launch of Trends in Biochemical Sciences in 1976 and Trends in Neurosciences in 1978. The first editor of TIPS was John Lamble, who reminisces on those early days and years of TIPS in an editorial written on the eve of 25 years of the journal [1 ]. As I read about the history of TIPS, I was particularly struck by his thoughts where John recollects how TIPS first started to publish articles highlighting the use of computers in pharmacology during the early 1980s. In the years since then the field has seen immense progress, and computers are now being used in a variety of complex applications in pharmacology. With increased computing power and large datasets being generated in experiments, computers are now being used to learn from the available data (train) and predict outcomes. Consequently, they have developed to 'think' like humans. The term 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI)i is used to refer to this 'thinking' capability of computers.*^e>kmukherjee@cell.com