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I am a Senior Staff Scientist at Immunex in Seattle. I have been employed there for 16 years and have been working in Biotech since I entered graduate school in 1978. I was responsible for the creation of the research intranet, supervising its increase from 18 pages I created over Christmas in 1995 to over 3000 pages 2 years later. I recognized several years ago the problems posed by the Bioinformatic Revolution. There was way too much information for people to actually use.
I wrote a white paper last year examining the next step. I discussed the need to take the tacit information that scientists had and convert it into explicit knowledge. I looked at the many ways this could be done, how knowledge could be created and be dispersed. It pretty much fell on deaf ears. Radio offers extremely important powers for creating and dispersing knowledge but acceptance has been slow, most likely because we are in the middle of a takeover by Amgen and many are waiting for the other show to drop.
Many scientists are focused so narrowly on their own area. Few have the time to read journal article and to stay up on meetings. I realized this problem was reaching crisis levels about 3 years ago. Immunex has always had a very open system of project meetings. Anyone can attend and, especially in the early years, these would be sites for a lot of creative problem-solving. As we got larger these changed to simple sessions for information transfer (i.e. 'Here is what I have done since the last time.'). Usually very polished presentations. No sloppy real-life science.
It became clear to me that even this was failing, that the only people that were going to the meetings or reading any of the minutes were the people who were working on the projects. There was little crossflow of knowledge.
The main reason was time. People were so pressed for time on their own projects, they had little to spend examining others. This greatly restricts the number of nimble minds that can vet any research approach. We had gone from a very powerful peer review approach to one that was much more narrow.
The approach I took to attack this was a weekly inhouse research newsletter called the Discovery Researcher. It started out creating bullet points for any of the meeting minutes that had come out the last week. Luckily, we had the minute meeting online so people could rapdly check out the material in more depth if they wanted. The newsletter grew to contain links to online journals that had come out in the last week, as well as links to selected papers I found interesting. People found these very useful.
But the greatest positive feedback I got came from a weekly column I wrote called 'My View'. I would discuss, in an informal way, some of the latest research that had been published. I would try to juxtapose several areas of research to get the readers to think. It was hugely popular.
I stopped writing these columns and the Discovery Researcher last year. But the columns live on. I have started working on some more and will post them as they become available. I love to write!!
Enjoy.
(I'm putting them in as gems so I don't have to reformat, etc. I have not checked out all the links but most still worked. And a few of the larger files - mostly quicktime movies - may noy upstream) 11:44:50 AM 
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