The NCBI: Publicly Available Tools and Resources on the Web

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) was established in November 1988, at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the United States. The NLM was chosen because it had experience in creating and maintaining biomedical databases and as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it could establish an intramural research program in computational molecular biology. The mission of the NCBI is to develop new information technologies to aid in the understanding of fundamental molecular and genetic processes that control health and disease. It was set up to perform these four major tasks as quoted from the NCBI web site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ ):