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Published online 4 March 2009 | Nature 458, 13 (2009) | doi:10.1038/458013a
News: Q&A
Something wiki this way comes
Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt reveal their vision for an open-access platform in medical research.
Last autumn, Merck & Co. announced the closing of subsidiary Rosetta Inpharmatics in Seattle, Washington (see Nature 456, 26–28; 2008.
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How exciting - for the third disease area, might you consider something a little out of the ordinary, like a rare disease? There are maybe 6-8000 of them, and all are terrifically underfunded ('have-nots') and could use a jolt from a tool like this. Researchers and patients coming together to aggregate!
It would be of interest to me, as a long term Statin side effect sufferer, to know if drug interaction and/or drug side effects, or investigative drug research results might be posted on this site. Regards, Brooks
Ah, yes. I almost forgot: KUDOS on getting out from under the Merck corporate thumb. Brooks
The life sciences could benefit tremendously from an open platform like this. NCBI and their governmental peers have done great things for making scientific knowledge available. But wikis show the power of lowering the barriers to micro-publishing even bits of scientific knowledge. I hope this platform might consider to take things a step further and allow for not just writing, but computing on the data.
Very exciting, but also a bit hazy with Sage seemingly being in a state of varporware. I find semantic wikis one of the most interesting technologies at the moment, and there are already biological semantic wikis in operations: SNPedia and my own Brede Wiki. Both of these wikis allow you to built open-access databases with micro-publishing.