David J. Lipman is an American

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual cell, a multicellular organism, or a community of interacting populations. They usually speciali ...

who from 1989 to 2017 was the director of the

National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. T ...

(NCBI) at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U ...

. NCBI is the home of

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain ...

, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...

sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combin ...

. In 2017, he left NCBI and became Chief Science Officer at

Impossible Foods Impossible Foods Inc. is a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. The company's signature product, the Impossible Burger, was launched in July 2016. In partnership with Burger King, Impossible Whoppers were released a ...

Education

Lipman received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his

M.D. Doctor of Medicine (abbreviated M.D., from the Latin ''Medicinae Doctor'') is a medical degree, the meaning of which varies between different jurisdictions. In the United States, and some other countries, the M.D. denotes a professional degree. T ...

in 1980 from the

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public university, public research university with campuses in Buffalo, New York, Buffalo and Amherst, New Yor ...

Career

Lipman was the founding director of the

, part of the

National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. It ...

at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Under his leadership, NCBI grew from fewer than a dozen people to more than 500 scientific staff, and it now hosts hundreds of scientific and medical databases including

PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center ...

, dbGaP, dbSNP, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), RefSeq, PubChem, and many more. The internal research program at NCBI included groups led by Stephen Altschul (another BLAST co-author), David Landsman, Eugene Koonin (a prolific author on

comparative genomics Comparative genomics is a field of biological research in which the genomic features of different organisms are compared. The genomic features may include the DNA sequence, genes, gene order, regulatory sequences, and other genomic structural ...

), and L. Aravind. Lipman is very well known for his seminal work on a series of sequence similarity algorithms, starting from the Wilbur-Lipman algorithm in 1983, FASTA search in 1985,

in 1990, and Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST in 1997. BLAST eventually became the most widely-used and highly-cited (over 160,000 citations as of 2021) sequence alignment program in the field, and the NCBI BLAST server today is one of its most heavily used resources. Lipman also worked for many years with Dennis A. Benson and others at NCBI on the maintenance and improvement of

, one of the world's largest databases of genome and protein sequence data. GenBank along with the European Nucleotide Archive and the DNA Data Bank of Japan form the

International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) consists of a joint effort to collect and disseminate databases containing DNA and RNA sequences. It involves the following computerized databases: DNA Data Bank of Japan (Japan) ...

(INSDC), a fully open, unrestricted database of genome sequences that has been the world's repository of such data since 1990. He was one of the originators of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, a project to sequence and make available the genomes of thousands of influenza virus isolates. He was one of the original signatories of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. He is also the

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

for an

open-access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

online

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. Content Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such ...

called '' Biology Direct''. In May 2017, Lipman left his role at the NCBI to join the plant-based meat company

as chief scientific officer.

Awards and honors

Lipman received the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies in 1996. In 2000, he was elected to the

National Academy of Medicine The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly called the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, En ...

. In 2004, he was awarded the ISCB Senior Scientist Award and elected an ISCB Fellow in 2009 by the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

. In 2005, Dr. Lipman was elected to the US

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

. In 2013, he received the award of a

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, D.C., NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. preside ...

"Open Science" Champion of Change.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lipman, David J. American bioinformaticians Brown University alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 21st-century American biologists Members of the National Academy of Medicine