Book excerpt: The first Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), will be held January 3-6, 1996 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii. PSB will bring together top researchers from North America, the Asian Pacific nations, Europe, and around the world, to exchange research results and address open issues in all aspects of computational biology. Replacing and extending the last three years of Biotechnology Computing Tracks at the Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences, PSB will provide a forum for the presentation of work in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modelling and other computational methods, as applied to biological problems, with emphasis on applications in data-rich areas of molecular biology.The PSB is focussed into 4 tracks, 4 minitracks, 2 workshops and includes two invited keynote speakers, viz., Logical Simulation of Biomolecular Information Pathways (Minoru Kanehisa, Kyoto Univ.) and CEX and the Single Chemist (David Weimger, DAYLIGHT Chemical Info. Syst.)