11 min reading time

I’m writing you from Southern Australia. You may recall my friend, Technologist Greg Eaton http://bit.ly/Greg_Eaton, invited me to mentor startups at incubator http://medgroup.biz/innovyz for the week.

Yesterday Greg shared a May 29 Brisbane newspaper article entitled, “Jellyfish sting offers hope in cancer battle.”

It began, “Scientists have analysed deadly box jellyfish venom for the first time, paving the way for better antidotes and studies into whether its toxins can be used in the fight against cancer.”

But the article is wrong.

Greg is certain and he has the scar to prove it.

That’s because famed zoologist Robert Endean, Jacqueline Rifkin, and Greg were the first to dissect the box jellyfish – in 1971! (Greg’s scar was from pipetting venom. Let’s just say they used crude tools back then.)

If the newspaper knew what to search, they may have found the 1975 paper, “ISOLATION OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF NEMATOCYST FROM THE CUBOMEDUSAN CHIRONEX FLECKERI.”

If the scientists knew where to look, they could have built upon a solid scientific foundation – instead of recreating the wheel.

Which brings us to today’s topic: What’s a practical way to get all our pre-digital learning online and searchable?

Of course, the implications far exceed scientific discovery, but it’s a good place to start!

Will it take a charitable foundation to pay for it all?

Is there a way to approach the most likely life-science beneficiaries to chip in for the project: To make our history scannable and searchable so we can stand on the shoulders of giants?

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The annual LIFE SCIENCE INNOVATION NORTHWEST (Seattle, June 30-July 1) attracts up to 1,000 guests at the Washington State Convention Center for a big picture overview of the Pacific Northwest industry potential and the issues affecting product innovation, capitalization and commercialization.

I’ll be there both days. Perhaps we’ll meet?

See http://medgroup.biz/Innovation-Northwest for details and to register.

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Nice response to last week’s “Know any billionaires with cancer” at

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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

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Burrell (Bo) Clawson
I research patents & design products to get a patented competitive position: Over 30 patents.
David, you and I recognize valuable data when we see it.

David Hajicek
Owner / Luthier at Hajicek Guitars
On a different ventilator, we would get units back from the field where it was claimed the alarm never went off. They even forgot to remove the duct tape from over the alarm. ;>)

I enjoy going through old patents and luckily searchable sources are now available to the layman. Hopefully this data is protected from attacks or just bad fortune.

Burrell (Bo) Clawson
I research patents & design products to get a patented competitive position: Over 30 patents.
Will, I read your post with much interest, since it is not just basic science that can get lost.

I did the pneumatics on the first microprocessor ventilator prototype that became eventually became the Bear Ventilator, originally from Bourns Life Systems Division and later Bear Medical.

An alcoholic VP overseer of the division caused the group to abandone the project after a very successful 6 month trial at Loma Linda Hospital. After disbanding the group, the alcoholic left & the new VP manager recognized the mistake and reformed an entire engineering group.

But the innovations I did in pneumatics and others did in logic were ignored and they started from scratch. The modular pneumatics manifold that I developed and the safety overpressure-underpressure reliefs were never implemented, probably because none of the new engineers wanted to figure out what we had done.

It is not just sophisticated things that are “lost”, but life saving safety features. Bear later had problems where once a ventilator alarm was silenced, it stayed off, which resulted in RTs/nurses fixing the issue and walking off without reactivating the alarm. People died because of that error.

Willi Glettig
Owner of LCC Engineering & Trading GmbH and co-owner of Koldsteril
Continuation
Now back to the discussion above. Life science research produces lots of experiments and data. Much is not reproducible and much research is primarily done to obtain some academic titles and not to create “better solutions for society”. Useful data is often put into patents and kept for a long time on Microfiche. I have spent hours going through dusty patents in the Australian patent office in Sydney to get a feeling of what has been done and how. It is also a great source for inspirations. Most patents are digitized since the nineties. Data miners love this trend but nobody talks about durability and productivity of the digitised data. In view about the poor reproducibility of data obtained through complex experiments I have my doubt that data mining can contribute much to progress in the life sciences. My observation is that an experienced medicinal chemist with a solid track record is more cost efficient and effective in drug discovery than data mining and internet based technologies. Drug discovery is about serendipity, behind that we have a haystacks of irreproducible data. In natural product research it is often the small, almost invisible peak that matters.
Another observation is “the reinvention of the wheel”. Every 20 to 40 years we tend to reinvent the wheel. Often we create new words and maybe new processes to recreate “new” products. (Just look what has been achieved with creation of “Nanotechnology”! Governments invested billions – mainly in research jobs. Unfortunately there are very few new nanotechnology based products. Much would have emerged anyway without “Nanotechnology”. Polymer chemist made nanoparticles long before the word Nanoparticles did appear. On the other hand until today we don’t have a stabile Lotus effect that works.
The biggest problem for creating progress in the life sciences is the lack of sufficient amount of development funds and investors that believe in a particular technology. Everything has become very short term and that is the death of progress in the life sciences
Internet is improving access to valuable information but also to more garbage – who knows the difference.

Willi Glettig
Owner of LCC Engineering & Trading GmbH and co-owner of Koldsteril
Hi Joe,
This is a great story and has generated past memories that I like to share with you.
1. I migrated as chemists and techno-entrepreneur to Australia. At that time there were a number of chemist analysing various marine toxins. It was about mid-seventies when Roche set up a Marine Research Lab in Dee Why, a suburb in Sydney. Roche scientists were focussing on discovering in marine life small toxic molecules for pharmaceutical application. Early eighties they stopped the project and concluded that molecules discovered were already known/synthesized – the only difference was that marine toxins contained bromine and the known/synthesized molecules chlorine as functional groups. They also hat no viable process to produce nature based marine toxins with complex structures. Roche decided to close the labs. After that the scientist started to set up public research centres in the northern part of Australia close to the barrier reefs.

Mid-eighties a group of scientist discovered that some coral produce very strong UV-protection factors. Marketing people in the only Australian generics pharmaceutical company developed the idea to commercialise the compounds for use in sun protection creams. Unfortunately nobody was ready to invest in proper synthesis and clinical test for regulatory purposes. During the same period a number of other exciting new technologies were developed with public money around Australia e.g. Lysine, Carotene, pro-vitamin?? Unfortunately the Australian Government as many other governments did not have the commitment and tenacity to develop the research results into exportable products. Life science development take 10 to 20 years – governments and most investors can’t cope with such time horizons. Investors were plenty but the money was invested into the primary and building sector, not into establishing new industries. Some overseas life science investors transferred the cheaply acquired Australian knowledge to USA and Europe. Pilferage was another problem (Just ask yourself where the Tea Tree oil plants now growing in Florida came from originally?
Personally I was lucky, I worked with financially strong free enterprise companies. Later as pioneering entrepreneur I initiated many new enterprises with technologies we developed. Today I visit Australia with my son I also visit places with remains of my early days achievements. I have good memories.
I will continue in the blog below

Beth Ann Fiedler, PhD
Editor at Elsevier, Inc
In short–use the library resources, take reading, reading comprehension, and writing seriously. For my graduate research, I had to resort to locating items on microfiche. Donabedian’s Organizational Performance Theory, created at the U of Michigan predominantly in the 1980’s, is often referenced in healthcare but hard to get your hands on an actual copy unless you go this route. Before that, many people would travel to the library that housed a special research collection–these special sections are common to all libraries even today. **Electronic database searches are accessible through university, college and the public library and through their online portals. All have some level of access to other state, national, or international libraries that have specific journals, books, research items, etc through the Inter Library Loan (ILL) program. In ILL. **You don’t have to be a PhD to get info–but then you do have to find a research specialist at the library of your choice. **Smaller local library budgets may mean finding a way to access material from the college that you graduated from. Cheaper to use portals such as “Ask A Librarian”. **If you are really lucky and looking for a special reference item that is not on the shelves, you may be influential in getting that item on the purchase list for their general collection. Seriously, one item that I want but is only available in law libraries and quite expensive is pending that process now. **PubMed, ABI Inform, and several other databases including those that specialize in music, business, art, physics, etc. can be found if you take the time to look for them. But a systematic literature review using topic credible keywords is still an art form and unfortunately, something that is only learned at the PhD level. My preliminary lit review for a book recently took 6 weeks and as I write, requires further information on certain aspects of information. Research is iterative and most think it is a one shot deal. **Though finding credible information is a necessary chore, disseminating and application of the information in the creation of a new and cohesive document is not as easy as it may look. That is why there are resources that check for material that has been plagiarized. Such web sites include turnitin.com and others. At these sites, your paper is normally uploaded by a professor and the document undergoes a review highlighting areas of concern and provides the percentage of items that are the same or similar. Sometimes, the content is a direct quote that if properly cited, is acceptable. Because of these sites, it is not as easy to turn in some obscure document from 1950 and pass it off as new as an increasing number of journals and resources are being scanned and added to the current electronic data collections. ***Research, real research, requires time and finesse–something that is not appreciated in an age where people think that Google is a primary resource instead of a supplemental method for gathering information.

Burrell (Bo) Clawson
I research patents & design products to get a patented competitive position: Over 30 patents.
Julie, neither paper, or digital data gives me warm and fuzzy feelings. Both can and have been lost, with the greatest writings of all antiquity disappearing from the library of Alexandria and now we have religious or political zealots who want to destroy at least some books.

There are scientists who have proposed putting whole books in the DNA of plants so that information will grow “forever.” That doesn’t guarantee it will happen to grow ‘forever’ or that humans will automatically remain ‘modern’ and able to read DNA after a cataclysm.

I think we will deal with a patchwork of knowledge storage as my best guess. Multiple types of data storage in multiple locations is what the IT techies recommend if you expect to get your data back.

Burrell (Bo) Clawson
I research patents & design products to get a patented competitive position: Over 30 patents.
David, one of the ways that pdfs minimize the ability to change data from “old” paper articles is when the pdf is one image per page from a scanner. Someone would have to be very intent on fraud to go to the work of changing even a few words in a scanned page so they looked “original.”

Howard Adamsky
Director of Talent Aquisition at Destination Weddings Travel Group
This is very interesting. Lots to consider.

David Hajicek
Owner / Luthier at Hajicek Guitars
I forgot about pdfs, those would be difficult (or at least a lot of work) to alter.

David Hajicek
Owner / Luthier at Hajicek Guitars
Another problem with digital records is that they are very easily altered in an undetectable way. Redundancy is needed to keep people from altering history.

Ruth Clark
Teacher / Designer at Stitching Arts and More
I am pleased to see a few responses, introducing Library based resources. The computer has not yet (and may never) replaced the value of referring to a quality Academic Library.
One other problem is that so many people only do searches on basic Google. As Julie pointed out Google Scholar is more appropriate. Netscape is another resource for non-academic references. Just out of interest, pick two or three topic to research, including a company name. Do all of these searches on both basic Google and Netscape. You may be amazed at the improved search results you get through Netscape.

Julie Omohundro
Principal Consultant at Class Three, LLC
David, I’m very skeptical that digital information is going to survive nearly as long as paper.

Redundancy is definitely good, but paper redundancy has been available since the Guttenberg first started rolling. One nice thing about paper, you don’t need to have a specific operating system or motherboard or version of Adobe to read it. The other nice thing is that, fire aside, a book or journal is overall not nearly as fragile as a piece of electronic equipment. Nor is there a worldwide paperweb that can collapse, rending paper inaccessible, or be hacked to wipe pages of books clean of their content.

I’m by no means a computer expert, but nothing I know about them makes me feel warm and secure about digital as the safeguard of our historical human knowledge.

Ellen Miseo
Chief Scientist a at TeakOrigin, Inc.
There are two problems here. The first is searching the literature. Young scientists think Google is the way to search. It is not. For searching techncal literature you need to be more sophisticated. Web of Knowledge searches databases back to 1950. SciFinder and STN (Both American Chemical Scoiety tools) can search the literature back very far. But it is not Google. It requires (maybe) logging into your institution’s library website to get at the tools. Even students at research univeristies that have acess to the tools I mention don’t use them because the attitude is “nothing is worth finding if it is over 5 years old.”

THe second is that no one wants to touch paper. Libraries don’t store it. But major scientific publishers have already dealt with this. If you go to the ACS website you can find the pdf for every Journal article published by the society. I just acessed articles from Volume 1 #2 of the Journal of the American Chemical Society published in 1879!

It really comes down to younger scietists and engineers not being taught how to search the literature, what to look for, where to look for it or what keywords to use. So Google it; nothing there? It doesn’t exist.

Michael Lehmicke
R&D Group Manager at Synthes
Proof that while the internet is invaluable, it’s no substitute for a strong personal network. Sometimes is who you know and what they know.

Marianna Luppi
Senior Safety, Compliance & Regulatory Manager @Philips Innovation Service
We have several examples from the past: medieval manuscripts before Gutemberg, Leonardo da Vinci inspired by Alessandria Library, etc… now we have this media accessible quite everywhere, anywhere and to all people willing to read and surf into it. Do not complain to much if something is still not loaded and consider how many people are working to improve that 🙂

Mitchell Collier
Medical Communications Program Manager | Writer | Connected Health
See the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central project to scan and make available archives of the scientific literature. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/scanning — NLM is planning anther scanning project to bring even more literature to light.

Carole Ann Goldsmith
International journalist, content writer, speech writer, author, trainer and assessor.
Creatures hurt yet again using science as an excuse. Leave the poor jelly fish alone to swim in the sea.

Julie Omohundro
Principal Consultant at Class Three, LLC
Digitization projects are underway all over the globe.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has published guidelines for digitizing collections and holdings in the public domain, particularly those held by libraries and archives. It is anticipated that the guidelines will eventually be published by UNESCO.

Copyright is indeed a bar for including many scientific, technical, and medical publications in these projects. It’s not clear how much practical impact the 1998 Act had on useful access to these documents, given that copyright was already in place for the life of the author plus 50 or 75 years. In addition, many journals have digitized their older issues and made them available online. For example, the 1975 paper can be found by searching PubMed or Google Scholar for several of the keywords, and is available for purchase from Toxicon:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0041010175901993

My guess is it was the lack of knowing keywords like Chironex fleckeri that prevented the newspaper from finding it.

David Hajicek
Owner / Luthier at Hajicek Guitars
One other factor is; how is this new digital information going to be stored? We assume that data is magically stored somewhere (Cloud?). For information this important, it needs a robust means of storage that will not be forgotten when the next storage media break-through happens. There also needs to be redundancy so that the data is not lost if an event (like the Library at Alexandria burning down) happens.