In this era of high‐throughput biology, bioinformatics has become a major discipline for making sense out of large‐scale datasets. Bioinformatics is usually considered as a practical field developing databases and software tools for supporting other fields, rather than a fundamental scientific discipline for uncovering principles of biology. The KEGG resource that we have been developing is a reference knowledge base for biological interpretation of genome sequences and other high‐throughput data. It is now one of the most utilized biological databases because of its practical values. For me personally, KEGG is a step toward understanding the origin and evolution of cellular organisms.