Biology on the World Wide Web

The array of resources of significance to biologists grows literally daily; the possibilities I demonstrated as new wonders in this class a year ago have in some cases been eclipsed by other developments, in others have grown into essential tools. And W&L capabilities have come a long way in that year as well, with many more possibilities for access to the profusion of imagery and other digitizable qualities (motion, sound... can smell be far behind?).

New information access tools change the nature of the questions it is possible to ask; in research the problem keeps changing as means are found to answer outstanding questions, which in turn permit new questions to be posed. What you can see (what your categories and your apparatus permit) greatly affects what you do see. Thus, imaging technologies are changing the way science is done (see Scientific American November 1992 "Visualizing Biological Molecules" for some striking examples), just the latest episodes in a long and fascinating evolution.

What I want to concentrate on today is exemplars of electronic developments, and leave it to you to explore the Biology Department menu for specific useful resources. The menu itself evolves as I find new links that seem especially valuable, but you should be aware of several INDEXES that are very active and provide effective guidance through the anarchy of cyberspace:

Each of the above overlaps with the others, but each ALSO has unique offerings, and some change more rapidly than others.
The teaching of Biology (and other subjects too) is in a remarkable state of evolutionary development, exemplified by these links:
Doing science is a communication process, a verbal process. Research is always collaborative, and is aimed at communication, relies on communication, begins in the context of communication:
A scientific field is a unitary communicational community spread across both space and time, with everybody depending in some measure on everybody else for the furtherance of a common goal... As an activity, science is just an ongoing process of questioning, observing, experimenting, inferring, assessing, objecting, and so forth, and the validation of claims made within it does not consist of somebody saying authoritatively, "that's right" --for there is no one who can speak with such authority-- but consists rather of the fact that the content of the claim comes to be taken for granted in future inquiry by being used thenceforth as a premise or presupposition...
(from Joseph Ransdell "The Sciences, the Humanities, and the Collaboratory Network", an electronic document available on the Johns Hopkins University Department of History of Science gopher)

Communication among colleagues is a vital part of the research enterprise in all fields of science, and Biology is especially active in the realms of USENET and LISTSERV groups. Look at this list of Biology USENET groups on our tin menu. Amazing. Some of these aren't very active, but others are important media for collegial communication. There are links to Archives of BIOSCI groups (even more than we have via tin) and keyword searching in the BIOSCI archives.

Another medium is the LISTSERV, which one subscribes to and then receives all postings of by e-mail. Here's Una Smith's list of Biology LISTSERVs, probably somewhat out of date but indicative of the riches. You might be interested to know more about Una Smith herself.

Searchable databases make a fascinating study, and three are especially worthy of note: