Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
scientist uses many times a day, every day. The scientist expects, and needs, all
other applications either to feed information into it or extract information
from it. This drove the evolution of the ELN into a hub application that com-
municates in both subscribe and publish modes with all the other applications
that the scientist needs to use:
Databases are searched to help defi ne the experimental protocol.
Materials are resourced and ordered.
Equipment is allocated.
If equipment needs to be certifi ed, then the certifi cate information is
imported.
The experiment is performed.
Data that support the invention are imported.
There are of course many other benefi ts of an ELN, including the ability to
perform general searching across historical content, integration to structure
drawing tools, generic algorithms for systematic nomenclature generation, and
physicochemical property prediction as well as handling spectral data (see Fig.
19.3). The scientists have a general interface for accessing the majority of data
manipulation and handling they will require in terms of developing and docu-
menting a reaction.
19.4
A CORPORATE RESOURCE
Information captured in paper notebooks is essentially personal and with a
limited lifetime. It is very expensive to index the data to enable reuse.
Information could only be retrieved if you knew someone who might know
when and who did similar work. This led notebook records often to be sketchy
and illegible—the chance that my experimental details would be available to
other scientists was minimal. This happened even though the USPTO requires
that the information must be suffi ciently detailed to enable someone skilled
in the art to repeat an experiment.
Once electronic records were being captured and indexed in databases,
there was a good chance that someone else would read the information; the
more scientists who benefi ted, the better it was for the author. A side benefi t
of electronic notebook records is that the quality of the records has improved
dramatically, and because they are not handwritten, their legibility has greatly
improved. ELNs now provide a corporate resource of high-quality informa-
tion, not just details of experiments that worked but also what failed. Now the
organization can learn and benefi t from the body of work in the ELNs.
Companies now report that a signifi cant proportion of new experiments are
cloned (essentially copied and edited) from a previous record; Millennium
reports that 50% of the experiments are now cloned.
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