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 ...
