Building an 'EvoBank'

Courtesy of Gerhard W. Weber MEET MRS. PLES: Found in South Africa, this 2.5 million-year-old fossil graces the cover of a CD-ROM that contains digital 3-D data from CT scans in different formats. Paleoanthropologists are reputedly a passionate bunch, which is not surprising for a discipline that asks questions that hit close to home and relies heavily on interpreting differences among hard-won, unique specimens to provide answers. With a mixture of frustration and pride, they regularly repeat the quip that many major players refuse to convene in the same room. It's a reality that makes Bernard Wood's plan seem all the more ambitious. Wood, an adjunct senior scientist with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, wants his peers not only to sit down together, but pool data in an international, open-access database, akin to GenBank, for research on human evolution. Because the discipline depends on comparisons, Wood hopes that a central data repository would spur research progress as GenBank did for molecular biology, helping to break a logistical logjam in accessing far-flung specimens. His is not the first proposal,1 but he may be the first with enough clout to get such a project going. "We should all be wanting to democratize science," says Wood, who also teaches at George Washington University. "We should be making science, or the opportunity to do science, as widely available as possible." In January, Wood applied to the National Science Foundation for a small grant to put together a group of stakeholder representatives who could begin "putting some flesh on the bones" of the idea and hashing out potential conflicts. Wood has support. Says Phil Walker, incoming president of the American Association for Physical Anthropology: "The more access people have, the healthier the field will be. It just doesn't make sense to work partially in the dark, trying to figure out these very complex issues." Some resistance to sharing electronic data is likely, though. In a commentary, Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote, "There are no technical solutions to some problems."2 An established field researcher, White dismissed "seemingly sophisticated" computer analyses of electronic fossils "that have little or no biological validity," advising armchair paleoanthroplogists: "Relax. Reliable analytical results are worth the wait." PROTECTING ONE'S OWN While it would be difficult to upload a cranium or jaw, much valuable material can be shared electronically. Wood's ideal global database would include high-resolution and three-dimensional images, measurements, genetic data when possible, and published papers on living and fossil hominoids--members of the Great Ape family that includes humans. To secure broad participation, Wood believes that the database must be run like a scientific journal, with a respected editorial board enforcing its rules and vetting its contents. "It would need to have the confidence of the community--the people that find the fossils, the museums in which the fossils are kept, the researchers who might use the information in the database." Current problems with access to physical specimens are not just a matter of travel money. Some countries jealously guard their fossil gems, restricting access by foreign researchers. Moreover, field researchers have been known to withhold their best finds until they've completed their own exhaustive studies.3 The issue is not new to the NSF, the field's primary US funding source. The program directors for physical anthropology and archeology, Mark Weiss and John Yellin, are trying to organize a major meeting for this fall on the access issue. "It's nothing new, but with electronic access, it's becoming much more feasible to provide much more broad access," explains Weiss. Gerhard Weber, University of Vienna, thinks that especially for "holotype" specimens, which define new species, major journals should require that electronic data be made available as a condition of publishing even an announcement. As in the early years of GenBank, Weber believes the journals could exert a powerful influence in making voluntary data-sharing standard practice. An advocate of openness who has also called for a "common worldwide database" for fossil hominoids, Weber has been working on proofs-of-concept to show the value of digital fossils as research tools.4 Wood, too, already has created a simple database of 3-D images of Great Ape skeletons to demonstrate the scientific benefit of democratizing data access. He uses it to teach undergraduates. "We say ... this fossil was found and this fossil was found. How would you decide whether these two fossils might belong in the same species, or they might be males or females, or did they belong to different species? These are the questions that researchers have to answer. And they can respond to the challenge by actually collecting their own data from a comparative collection." Christine Soares can be contacted at csoares@the-scientist.com. References 1. G.W. Weber, "Virtual anthropology (VA): A call for glasnost in paleoanthropology," Anat Rec, 265:193-201, 2001. 2. T.D. White, "A view on the science: Physical anthropology at the millennium," Am J Phys Anthropol, 113:287-92, 2000. 3. A. Gibbons, "Glasnost for hominids: Seeking access to fossils," Science, 297:1464-8, 2002. 4. G.W. Weber, "Three-dimensional imaging in paleoanthropology and prehistoric archeology," Acts of the XIVth Congress, University of Liège, Belgium, 2001.

Building an 'EvoBank'

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

Courtesy of Gerhard W. Weber
MEET MRS. PLES: Found in South Africa, this 2.5 million-year-old fossil graces the cover of a CD-ROM that contains digital 3-D data from CT scans in different formats.