Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
production. The result of this investment is an ever-increasing number of sci-
entists who publish in an expanding number of journals and online media.
Furthermore, countries such as Brazil, China, and India are now becoming
signifi cant players in the biomedical research arena, challenging the predomi-
nance of the United States, Europe, and Japan. The astonishing increase in
effi ciency in communication brought about by the Internet has opened up new
possibilities for networking across this new global landscape. This chapter will
examine how biomedical networking has evolved from scientifi c academies
and personal correspondence to networking websites and data resources on
the Internet. It will also provide some examples of how recent initiatives in
computer-aided networking in the drug discovery arena may herald changes
in the management and dissemination of pharmaceutical discoveries.
10.2
HISTORY AND BACKGROUND OF SCIENTIFIC NETWORKS
The year 2010 marks the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal
Society, the world's oldest scientifi c networking organization. Now every
country with a signifi cant commitment to scientifi c research has its own
national academy operating along the same lines as the London institution.
The noticeable feature of these academies is their hierarchical structure built
from carefully selected individuals who make up an elite cadre of scientists.
Networking in face-to-face meetings was (and is) not always feasible, so those
people who want to communicate results, share or request samples, and coor-
dinate multinational projects would have to use whatever tools were available
to them. Until recently these tools consisted of just the letter and the tele-
phone. Charles Darwin is an example of someone who acquired vast amounts
of biological data from his correspondence with fellow naturalists and others
with intimate knowledge of the natural world. Although the Victorian postal
service that he used was comparatively effi cient compared with today's “snail
mail” (and Darwin's correspondence was prodigious), the need to communi-
cate by letter writing inevitably slowed the development of his ideas on evolu-
tion. A modern Darwin alive today would be able to condense decades of
networking into a few years, but it is interesting to speculate whether this
speed would come at the expense of deep critical thought undertaken at a
more leisurely pace. With a vast increase in competition through the globaliza-
tion of science, quiet contemplation is a luxury we can no longer afford; the
challenge therefore is how to maximize the effi ciency of all the traditional and
electronic networking tools that are now available to the biomedical scientist
who is suffering from information overload.
10.3
ONLINE NETWORKS
Many readers of this topic will have little or no recollection of the time when
computers were primitive devices with no connectivity to the outside world.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search