Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!uunet!shelby!apple!bionet!bionet-20.bio.net!GVYAS.LANE From: GVYAS.LANE@BIONET-20.BIO.NET (Philip Lane) Newsgroups: bionet.general Subject: bionet closure Message-ID: <12511260724.24.GVYAS.LANE@BIONET-20.BIO.NET> Date: 19 Jul 89 16:07:47 GMT Sender: daemon@NET.BIO.NET Lines: 61 Jim Cassatt Project Officer Genbank Sir: Dan Davison, at Los Alamos, suggested through a posting on the Bionet "Bionet-News" bullitin Board that concerned Bionet users should write to you to protest the impending closure of the Bionet resource. This communication demonstrates one of the invaluable resources that Bionet provides working molecular biologists like myself: by posting a message on the net, one can contact a diverse variety of researchers, many more than one might know personally. For example, I once needed a fluorochrome-labelled dideoxynucleotide, but had no idea where to locate such a reagent. I posted a message to the net and in 24 hours received 6 responses; three of them directed me to Dupont/NEN which (it so happens) makes exactly what I need, even though it's not in their catalog yet. As I see it, Bionet provides two invaluable services and one very useful service. The bullitin boards and net communications services are invaluable, increasingly so over time as more researchers use them, and CANNOT be replaced. A bionet-type facility deserves to exist solely for this goal, to increase communication among researchers. Secondly, Bionet provides the most up-to-date access to Genbank DNA sequence databases and the various other databases, along with database search capability. This service is not duplicable in any one research laboratory without a major investment in computer resources, an in any event onsite database searching is only as current as the most recent database version you've received, and Bionet is always four months or so faster than any other update method. Genbank currently is 16 or 18 megabases, and its doubling time, as DNA sequencing gets faster and as the human genome project gets online, will probably rapidly drop from years to months. Even expensive PCs can only handle 80 meg or so storage, and the increase in affordable PC memory is sure to be vastly exceeded by the increase in Genbank size over the coming years. Therefore, database searches which are only marginally practical onsite currently will rapidly become wildly impractical unless everyone buys a mainframe or unless a bionet-type facility is continued. Finally, Bionet provides DNA and protein analysis software services. It is true that this service can be duplicated onsite with a basic PC and commercially available software packages, but those cost 5-10,000 dollars for the whole system plus software, and Bionet was $400/year, so small labs REALLY depend on Bionet for these functions. I understand the NIH funding was discontinued because "Bionet was not doing enough research" ... I think its urgent to realize that it was providing a series of services to researchers which aided to an exceptional degree THEIR ability to perform research, and that this characteristic (without ANY basic research performed directly by BIONET) is an absolute justification for the continued existence of Bionet or a bionet-like facility. I urge you to take all steps necessary to refund bionet or to provide alternate bionet-like services to the molecular biology research community. Thank you. Sincerely, Philip K. Lane, M.D. Postdoctoral Fellow, Transfusion Research Program, Department of Laboratory Medicine, UCSF -------