Computational biology, a branch of biology involving the application of computers and computer science to the understanding and modeling of the structures and processes of life. It entails the use of computational methods (e.g., algorithms) for the representation and simulation of biological systems, as well as for the interpretation of experimental data, often on a very large scale. The beginnings of computational biology essentially date to the origins of computer science. British mathematician and logician Alan Turing, often called the father of computing, used early computers to implement a model of biological morphogenesis (the development of pattern and form in living organisms) in the early 1950s, shortly before his death. At about the same time, a computer called MANIAC, built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for weapons research, was applied to such purposes as modeling hypothesized genetic codes. (Pioneering computers had been used even earlier in the 1950s for numeric calculations in population genetics, but the first instances of authentic computational modeling in biology were the work by Turing and by the group at Los Alamos.By the 1960s, computers had been applied to deal with much more-varied sets of analyses, namely those examining protein structure. These developments marked the rise of computational biology as a field, and they originated from studies centred on protein crystallography, in which scientists found computers indispensable for carrying out laborious Fourier analyses to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins.