Larry Hunter had just moved into his new office when a reporter visited, so the room lacked knickknacks and family snapshots. Hunter had, however, started unpacking his books, and they were already beginning to form an interesting pattern. Roger Schank's Dynamic Memory, a classic title in artificial intelligence, was shelved next to Georg Schulz's Principles of Protein Structure. Machine Learning flanked Oncogenes. Artificial Life leaned on Medical Informatics.

Properly interpreted, the pattern on Hunter's bookshelf reveals the latest trend in biology, a field now so overwhelmed by information that it is increasingly dependent on computer scientists like Hunter to make sense of its findings. An expert in an offshoot of artificial intelligence research known as machine learning, in which computers are taught to recognize subtle patterns, Hunter was recently lured from a solitary theoretical post in the National Library of Medicine to head the molecular statistics and bioinformatics section at the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-a group formed in 1997 to use mathematical know-how to sift the slurry of biological findings.