Biology is now being viewed as an informational science.  The Institute for Systems Biology emerged from the conviction that systems biology will be the major focus in biology and medicine in the 21st century and that cross-disciplinary partnerships (biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and physicists) are essential for realizing the potential of this new view. Lee Hood discusses the fundamental paradigm changes, in part, catalyzed by the Human Genome Project that lead to this view of systems biology. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2000