The Future of the Web

Recently, I watched Sir Timothy Berners-Lee’s TED talk The next Web of open, linked data . Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web and the talk is extremely thought-provoking.

Today’s internet is something we frequently take for granted – as if we have always had the power to access a trillion hyperlinked documents.  But listening to Berners-Lee makes you consider the time before the web was born.  In the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee was frustrated by the difficulty in unlocking the enormous potential of his lab’s data, methods, devices and protocols.  He sought a way to easily share documents and link information and eventually came up with the idea of using the internet to link hypertext documents.

That was 20 years ago.  Last month, Berners-Lee took the stage at TED to advocate the use of the web to more fully realize his initial aspirations – to inspire us all with a vision of what the web could become. 

Berners-Lee’s vision for the future of the web relies on access to raw data. He proposes that when data is isolated, its usefulness is severely limited and calls for everyone to upload raw data onto the web.  

Having access to the data is not enough. In order to unlock the full potential of data we have to find and understand relationships between data.  Berners-Lee’s offers the example of combining genomic data and protein data to gain new insight into Alzheimer’s disease.  Relationships between previously unconnected data could be found and understood in a semantic web composed of well-tagged data.  Berners-Lee sees this next step in the evolution of the web as not only likely, but inevitable.

It was an inspiring talk and the message resonated strongly with me.  I believe that web technology will soon provide a disruptive leap forward in the way science is done. My interactions with the NextBio scientific community regularly demonstrate to me that we are well on our way to making the leap and it was exciting to hear a visionary like Tim Berners-Lee further confirm this belief.

Watch the video. Be inspired.

The Commonwealth Club of California

I am quite excited to announce that I am the newest member of the Science and Technology Steering Committee for the Commonwealth Club of California!

The Commonwealth Club is an outstanding organization. It is the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum and has been fostering education through open public discussion for over a hundred years. If you aren’t familiar with the Commonwealth Club, you may want to take a look at their site to read about their history and look at all the interesting talks on the calendar.

The committee works to promote a better understanding of science and technology with meaningful, topical talks given by astute presenters. It was an honor to be invited to join the committee and to be able to work with its dynamic, intelligent, civic-minded members. We have some very fascinating science talks scheduled in the next few months including Personal Genomic Testing with a panel composed of 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey, Pacific Research Institute Fellow Daniel Ballon, Stanford Professor David Magnus and Yale Professor Mark Gerstein.

There are a great many exciting talks in the works – I can’t talk about them until all the details are nailed down, but I can say that you can expect to see programs covering such things as: open science, artificial intelligence, the Mars mission, and DNA-based pharmacology.

I’ll be attending many events at the Commonwealth Club this spring, and I will definitely be blogging about those that are relevant to life science and of interest to NextBio users. So stay tuned to this blog for more news of science and technology talks at the Commonwealth Club.

There’s Still Time To Apply For The NextBio Travel Grant

The deadline for application to the NextBio Travel Grant is less than a week away.  Haven’t started your application yet?  Don’t panic.  You still have time to apply. 

We purposefully designed the grant application to be simple and easy.  To apply for the NextBio Travel Grant, you won’t need official copies of all your academic transcripts since birth. Nor will you need to be  a member of an exclusive professional society that requires three sponsors and a hefty membership fee.  In fact, all you need to do to apply for the NextBio Travel Grant is to tell us how the NextBio tools have been useful to you in the pursuit of your research. 

Maybe you use our awesome literature search to quickly find the relevant papers you need.  Maybe you use our data-driven search to find correlations between genes within the NextBio curated collection of public experimental data.   However you use NextBio, we want to hear about it!

Remember, the NextBio Travel Grant will give out awards of $500 to attend any science conference you choose.  Complete details are available here.  

Notes From The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference

On Friday I attended the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference held in San Francisco. It was an exciting day of talks including the announcement of the transfer of a large amount of Merck data into the public domain through the new non-profit entity, Sage.

Many of the conference talks addressed the problem of accessing and connecting massive amounts of biological data, including the talk given by my colleague, NextBio cofounder Ilya Kupershmidt.  I’ll readily admit I am biased – I think Ilya is the bee’s knees – but I thought Ilya did an exceptional job addressing these issues.   He detailed the challenges of effectively leveraging the ever-increasing collection of biological data in a clear and logical manner and then went on to present a compelling approach.

While the last day of a conference generally tends to be fairly low energy,   Ilya’s talk created an audible buzz and several enthusiastic conversations.  It could be that the vaguely coffee-flavored beverage served by the conference center was actually some kind of GMO supercoffee, but my bet is that the energy was brewed up by Ilya’s talk.*

*My apologies to those who do not share my love of bad puns