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Question

[cdsouthan]

AWAK NCBI and EBI offer many closely overlapping databases and searching functioality that we have lived with and often used from both places for decades

My question was is this strategically mandated by the management on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes I know they have collaborations in some areas like the famous INSDC

Answer 1

[GenoMax]

Good historical perspectives in respective WikiPedia articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Molecular_Biology_Laboratory and https://www.ebi.ac.uk/history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Biotechnology_Information

EMBL was the idea of Leó Szilárd James Watson and John Kendrew Their goal was to create an international research centre, similar to CERN, to rival the strongly American-dominated field of molecular biology

NCBI did not start managing GenBank until 1992. DDBJ did not start until 1986.

INSDC was started 30 years ago so the collaboration is a long running one.