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P.J. Bickel 67school interest, biology. After various missteps I was able to build up a groupwith a new colleague, Haiyan Huang, supported initially by an NSF/NIGMSgrant, working on problems in molecular biology with a group at the LawrenceBerkeley Lab. Through a series of fortunate accidents our group became theonly statistics group associated with a major multinational effort, the EN-CODE (Encyclopaedia of DNA) project. The end product of this effort, apartfrom many papers in Nature, Science, Genome Research and the like, was aterabyte of data (Birney et al., 2007).Iwasfortunateenoughtoacquireastudent,James(Ben)Brown,froman engineering program at Berkeley, who had both an intense interest in, andknowledge of, genomics and also the critical computational issues that arean integral part of such a collaboration. Through his participation, I, andto a considerable extent, Haiyan, did not need to immerse ourselves fully inthe critical experimental issues underlying a sensible data analysis. Ben couldtranslate and pose old and new problems in terms we could understand.The collaboration went on for more than five years, including a pilotproject. During this time Ben obtained his PhD, continued as a postdoc andis now beset with job offers from computational biology groups at LBL andall over. Whether our group’s participation in such large scale computationalefforts can continue at the current level without the kind of connection toexperimentalists provided by Ben will, I hope, not be tested since we all wishto continue to collaborate.There have been two clearly measurable consequences of our participation.(a) Our citation count has risen enormously as guaranteed by participationin high-visibility biology journals.(b) We have developed two statistical methods, the GSC (Genome StructuralCorrection) and the IDR (the Irreproducible Discovery Rate) which haveappeared in The Annals of Applied Statistics (Bickel et al., 2010; Li et al.,2011) and, more significantly, were heavily used by the ENCODE consortium.6.5 Some observationsOne of the things that has struck me in writing this is that “old ideas neverdie” and they may not fade away. Although I have divided my interests intocoherent successive stages, in fact, different ideas frequently reappeared.For instance, second-order theory and early papers in Bayes procedurescombined in a paper with J.K. Ghosh in 1990 (Bickel and Ghosh, 1990) whichgave what I still view as a neat analysis of a well-known phenomenon calledthe Bartlett correction. Theoretical work on the behavior of inference in HiddenMarkov Models with Ritov and Ryden (Bickel et al., 1998) led to a study