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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The real difficulty, however, could lie in redirecting the scientific mind from individual to collective. The AfCS comprises more than 50 investigators from 20 academic and industrial institutions, and has garnered financial support from pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lily and Company and Johnson & Johnson. Gilman, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for discovering G proteins asks, "Can we get the community to behave in a benevolent, interactive, cooperative manner? Only time will tell."

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