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. Peter Schuster † 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. Proofing – already existing – theorems by computers goes back to the nineteen fifties and has been generally accepted as a useful tool in pure and applied mathematics [1]. Since proofs for unsolved problems were done by computer assistance – the first popular example has been the four color problem [2,3] – the society of mathematicians is divided on the issue of proof by computer [4]. The arguments of the proponents of computer proofs are straightforward: The conventional proofs for many conjectures are so complex that they fail to be discovered by the unaided brain, and automated proofing provides an alternative that is cheap and has shown to be successful in numerous cases of problems already solved by conventional methods. The arguments of the opponents are really not less convincing: A proof to be intellectuable to the human mind has to be casted into a number of – logical – statements that are comprehensible. If the number of statements is so large that the proof cannot be understood in reasonable time, then the proof has to be rejected. A problem arises with most computer proofs, because the number of statements to be executed in performing formal proofs is so large that human step-by step tracking might last thousands of years and more. The conflict has been ignited by the computer solution of Johannes Kepler’s conjecture on the solution of the ball stacking problem [4,5]: Thomas Hales succeeded to provide a computed proof for the conjecture, which required about 3 GByte memory space for code, input and output. The reviewers of the 250-page manuscript submitted by Thomas Hales and Samuel Ferguson to the Annals of Mathematics saw themselves unable to decide whether or not this monstrous proof is correct. They ended up exhausted in the year 2003 by concluding that the proof is certainly 99% correct. Evidently this is not sufficient for a mathematical proof. Finally an * The essay has been published in Complexity 19/4: x-xx (2014). † Peter Schuster, Editor-in-chief of Complexity is at the Institut für Theoretische Chemie der Universität Wien, Währingerstraße 17, 1090 Wien, Austria. E-mail: pks@tbi.univie.ac.at