A Story

A little bit about myself. I am a staff scientist at Immunex Corp. in Seattle (shortly to be a research division of Amgen but that is another story;-) I graduated from CalTech in 1978, got my Ph.D in Biochemistry at Rice University in 1984, did a postdoc at the University of Colorado at Boulder until 1986 when I joined Immunex. I was employee 105. We have several thousand employees now.

I was one of the few biologists who liked computers and math. I was the first person in the department to use a computer to write my thesis (an old Trash-80) and I did not pay someone to type it for me but hooked up a daisy wheel printer. Everyone else had to use carbon paper to make copies and making changes were horrible.

Now, bioinformatics is a big deal. The problem is that few people talk both languages. And, even more important, the huge amount of information being generated is simply overwhelming. I have been very focused recently on how knowledge can be created from information. As a company, we need to worry about this, since in a few years, every company will have access to the human genome and the same information. Only companies that can effectively create knowledge from this information overload will be successful.

I have played with Frontier since before Dave moved it to Windows. I kind of moved on but what a thrill it was to find Radio. This is exactly the sort of tool we can use in science. The web was originally developed so that scientists at CERN could communicate with one another, even if they were in different countries. Radio provided the opportunity for us to get back to that level of communication.

By making it easy for the tacit knowledge of each scientist to be dispersed to others, we can create useful knowledge from the glut of information being generated. RSS makes it so much easier to aggregate information and now we can post by clicking 2 butons. No need for learning HTML.

I'll write more later. But I am soooo excited about the possibilities.

Just wanted to mention that John Robb's k-log discussion group at Yahoo has also been a very useful arena for discussion.