Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!CU.NIH.GOV!CZJ
From: CZJ@CU.NIH.GOV
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: genbank funding
Message-ID: <9008091607.AA07669@alw.nih.gov>
Date: 9 Aug 90 16:07:47 GMT
Sender: daemon@genbank.BIO.NET
Lines: 31

It is nice to see all of the activity that Dan has generated on the
GenBank bboard after months of inactivity.  Clearly it is the
responsibility of NIH to do all of the things that Dan talked about
and unfortunately much more.  Despite the generous funds now available
to support GenBank and EMBL activities, there will never be enough
money to do all of the things that GenBank (or any other database)
should do.  With paylines hovering in the mid-teens and award rates in
the low twenties, it is hard to justify additional funds for databases
like GenBank.

Dan points to one thing that bears further discussion.
There is no question that GenBank received totally inadequate funding
during its initial contract period.  The result was a considerable lag
period in entering sequence data and unannotated entries.
Interestingly enough, the turnaround came with discussions about the
importance of the human genome project.  One very important fallout
was the realization of the importance of the sequence data and the
databases that stored them.  Without such discussions and exposure, I
doubt that such funding would have materialized.

Another important part of the discussions was the realization that a
significant part of the budget had to be put aside for database
issues.  Although this facet is recognized as important to the Genome
project, the arguement could have just as easily been made for any
other branch of science.  Nonetheless, when times get tight, it
becomes increasingly difficult to find funds for resources such as
databases as this necessarily mean that outstanding projects are not
funded.


Jim Cassatt