NDLI: How DENDRAL was conceived and born

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In praise of computing

How DENDRAL was conceived and born

Planting the seeds

Medical informatics: a personal view of sowing the seeds

History of the development of medical information systems at the Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital

The LINC was early and small

The UCLA Brain Research Institute data processing laboratory

The history of the use of computers in the interpretation of radiological images

Recollections on the processing of biomedical signals

An historical perspective on clinical laboratory information systems

Health care information systems: a personal historic review

The perception of system and the reduction of uncertainty

History of the TDS medical information system

Patient management systems: the early years

The background of INTERNIST I and QMR

Artificial intelligence in medicine: a personal retrospective on its emergence and early function

How DENDRAL was conceived and born

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Lederberg, J.
Abstract	As agreed with your organizers, this will be a somewhat personal history. They have given me permission to recall how I came to work with Ed Feigenbaum on DENDRAL, an exemplar of expert systems and of modeling problem-solving behavior. My recollections are based on a modest effort of historiography, but not a definitive survey of and search for all relevant documents. On the other hand, they will give more of the flow of ideas and events as they happened than is customary in published papers in scientific journals — accounts so dry that Medawar lugubriously calls them fraudulent {43}; cf. Merton & Zuckerman {44, 45, 61}. These authors point out that the standard scientific publication is narrowmindedly devoted to the context of justification. The DENDRAL effort (along with much of medical informatics) is dedicated to discovery: should we use a different standard for its history?I hope it will be eventually possible to divert my colleagues from the more important work they do from day to day, and join me in a larger effort at historical research and informed consensus. My account is inevitably incomplete, especially about what others were thinking at a given moment. Built into the phenomenon of history, as soon as enough time has passed to enable some detached judgment, the evidence becomes frail, and we become vulnerable to the myths we create. Understanding all of these limitations, I will no longer qualify every remark: it should be implicit that each is “to the best of my recollection / or / as best as can be inferred from the fragmentary documentary record”.I will assume you are generally familiar with DENDRAL, and will concentrate mainly on material not found in the published papers, especially as there is a comprehensive synopsis {41}.As computer science is not my primary profession, my relationship to it has been more episodic; and I can more readily isolate how I came to take some part in it, at Stanford from 1962 - 1978, mainly in very close collaboration with Ed Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, and a host of others. My central scientific commitments have been to molecular genetics, starting when I was a 20-year old medical student in 1945 {38}. At Columbia and then at Yale, I worked on the genetics of bacteria, a specialty which converged with the role of DNA as genetic information. My first academic appointment was at the University of Wisconsin from 1947 - 1958; then I went to Stanford in 1959 to take part in the reconstruction of its School of Medicine (formerly in San Francisco) at the Palo Alto campus. My role was to found a new Department of Genetics; I had no plan to be working with computers. In fact, I met Ed Feigenbaum in 1963. Then, promptly after he moved from Berkeley to Stanford faculty in early 1965, we initiated the collaboration that became the DENDRAL project.
Starting Page	5
Ending Page	19
Page Count	15
File Format	PDF
ISBN	0897912489
DOI	10.1145/41526.41528
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1987-12-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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