quoted (use cpunk@cpunk.com as email address for login) :
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Systems biologists envision a hulking database where all biological knowledge can be stored, freely accessed, and designed to interact. From it, researchers could easily extract data to construct virtual molecular pathway models working in their respective networks and in dynamic contexts of time, space, and various environmental cues. Hypotheses could be plucked like apples from the electronic tree of knowledge, and drug targets would fall like leaves. Some want to play out this tremendous vision, but they know it cannot be done at a single lab, by a single investigator. Members of Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS), call for a new scientific world order--a shift toward socialist science.
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I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it socialist science! However, this sort of information system sounds extremely powerful.

[well, it would be social science in that with that system, all of the scientists who used that system would be "collaborating". It may help in progressing science at a fast rate...I don't know. But with "drug targets falling like leaves", I think it would make competition stiffer, which would lead to more secrecy of drug companies, make people file for patents earlier than ever before, etc, etc. Hmm.
On a lighter note, you should check out this site just to see the image they have that I guess is supposed to symbolize socialist science. A big red hand in a fist holding a pipetman. I would *kill* to have that in poster size. - Nano]

The Scientist :: The People's Biology, Feb. 24, 2003