A physicist with the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Walter Goad became interested in molecular biology in the mid-1960s, devoting nearly all of his research to the analysis, storage and retrieval of information relating to nucleic acid sequences by the early 1970s. He was among the founders of GenBank, the world's first nucleic acid database, and was influential in the development of computational techniques for the analysis of DNA sequences. In the late 1980s, he served on the steering committee overseeing the establishment of the Human Genome Project. The Goad Papers relate primarily to the establishment and early operation of GenBank, the early phases of the Human Genome Project, and, more generally, to Goad's role as godfather of the new field of bioinformatics.