Eric Lander: Fifteen years ago computers played no significant role in biology. Biology has only become a computational discipline primarily in the last decade or so. So the time that I was getting into it as a mathematician, I was reasonably convinced that what I had done in mathematics was utterly irrelevant, and would be utterly irrelevant in the biology I did. Now biological computation — bioinformatics — are becoming tremendously important areas, and it’s becoming very clear that a large portion of biology is going to start with the information first, to generate the hypotheses for the lab, and so the field will have undergone a dramatic transformation over this period. If I had sought really good advice when I was in school, no one would have told me to use mathematics as a way into biology. Luckily, I never sought any of that advice. It just sort of happened.