Are computer scientists the sutlers of modern biology?: Bioinformatics is indispensible for progress in molecular life sciences but does not get credit for its contributions

At present bioinformatics is indispensible for the life sciences. The data flood is enormous and cannot be inspected and analyzed anymore by human eye and brain. This fact alone initiates a new area of science and mathematics: The experimentalist records amounts of data, which escape all attempts of direct visualization and cannot be handled without extensive assistance by computers. Elaborate mathematical proofs are often so complex that they require at least partial help by computation. Burning questions arise in this context: “Can we trust computers?” or “Is large scale software running on our gigantic machines really free of bugs?” Different disciplines react differently to such issues: Mathematical purists are very reluctant to accept proofs by computer, theoretical physicists are most open minded and commonly rely on their gigantic computer programs, chemists in essence got acquainted with computational chemistry and are accepting theory with decreasing resistance, and finally biologists cannot do modern molecular life sciences without an impressive collection of computational tools.