Funding Cuts Threaten Big Data

Reduced support from the US National Library of Medicine threatens to shut down five popular biological databases.

Written byJef Akst

| 2 min read

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In 2007, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) shunted millions of dollars away from infrastructure grants, which supported widely used databases that house terabytes of biological data, and instead invest those resources in informatics research, Nature reported. As a result, at least five such databases are now facing serious funding shortages and are on the brink of being shuttered.

“The idea that this resource could just disappear is a serious problem for everyone who relies on it,” Mark Musen, a bioinformatician at Stanford University in California, and manager of one such database called Protégé, told Nature.

“As journals, we cannot host all the data that are part of the paper, and so if they disappear, it’s a big deal,” Inês Chen, chief editor at Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (NSMB) said in the same article.

But the databases are not going down without a fight from their user communities. ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
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Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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