biology

Lincoln Stein

Lincoln Stein is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Lincoln Stein rather than just read about it. In short: Lincoln David Stein is an American computational biologist and bioinformatician known for his contributions to community data resources, genome informatics, and open-source bioinformatics software. He is a senior investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.

Key takeaways

Lincoln Stein belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lincoln Stein to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lincoln Stein from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lincoln David Stein is an American computational biologist and bioinformatician known for his contributions to community data resources, genome informatics, and open-source bioinformatics software. He is a senior investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Stein has played a leading role in the development of widely used bioinformatics infrastructure and biological data resources, including the Generic Model Organism Database project, BioPerl, WormBase, and the Reactome pathway database. His work has also contributed to large international genomics initiatives such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium and the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project.

Education Stein completed a Doctor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a PhD in Cell Biology at Harvard University both in 1989 via the MD-PhD program. His thesis investigated gene cloning in Schistosoma mansoni.

Career From 1992 to 1997, Stein served as director of informatics at the MIT Genome Center at the Whitehead Institute. During this period he worked on computational infrastructure for the Human Genome Project, contributing to early genome mapping resources and the development of model organism databases including early work on WormBase From 1998 to 2007, he was an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he led the development of several widely used bioinformatics resources and standards, including WormBase, the Sequence Ontology, and the Reactome pathway database, and contributed to international genomics initiatives such as the HapMap Project. In 2007, Stein joined the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research as a senior investigator and later became a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. His work during this period has focused on computational infrastructure and data resources for large-scale cancer genomics, including contributions to the International Cancer Genome Consortium and the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project.

Research Stein's work has focused on the development of widely used bioinformatics software and biological databases. He has contributed to several major community resources including WormBase, Reactome, BioPerl, the Generic Model Organism Database project, and the Sequence Ontology. He has also participated in large international genomics initiatives including ENCODE and the modENCODE project. Stein is the original developer of CGI.pm and a contributor to mod_perl, both widely used within the Perl programming language ecosystem for web applications. He has also authored several influential books on web programming and network programming in Perl.

Selected books Stein, Lincoln D. (1997). How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-63462-4. Stein, Lincoln D. (1998). Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-24744-9. Stein, Lincoln D. (1998). Web Security: A Step-by-Step Reference Guide. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-63489-1. MacEachern, Doug; Stein, Lincoln D. (1999). Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-56592-567-0. Stein, Lincoln D. (2001). Network Programming with Perl. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-61571-5.

Awards and honours Stein was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) in 2004. He was elected an ISCB Fellow in 2016 by the International Society for Computational Biology.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lincoln Stein

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lincoln Stein claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lincoln Stein before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lincoln Stein ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lincoln Stein

In research: Lincoln Stein appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lincoln Stein in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lincoln Stein is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1960 births, American bioinformaticians, Computational biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lincoln Stein outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Lincoln Stein in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lincoln Stein means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lincoln Stein out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lincoln Stein in simple terms?

Why does Lincoln Stein matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lincoln Stein?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lincoln Stein.