Scientists Benefit As Life Sciences Companies Stream To The Web

The Web Author: Robert Finn Sidebar:Web Addresses of Selected Life Sciences Companies The last 18 months have seen the rapid spread of the World Wide Web, a new medium of communication that some compare to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in significance. The Web may not continue to live up to this level of hype, and its explosive growth may one day slow. But it's undeniable that many companies and individuals are betting millions of dollars that the Web will change the face of commerce. Leading the charge to the Web are companies in the life sciences, a large number of which set up home pages in 1995 to provide information about their products and to offer service to their customers. Of the few that have not, most have plans to be up sometime this year, although there remain a few skeptics, and a few more companies that are just moving toward the Web slowly and with deliberation. Despite such skepticism, most discussion among life-sciences companies these days involves not whether to establish a Web presence, but how best to exploit the new medium. GREETINGS FROM CYBERSPACE: Novagen Inc.'s Web page helps the firm connect to its academic customers. (Click on image for a larger view.) "If any business should be on the Web, biotechnology companies should be on the Web," maintains Hillary H. West, advertising coordinator for Madison, Wis.-based Novagen Inc., which manufactures advanced molecular biology reagents and kits. "Many of our customers are at universities, and they're people who are already connected. They're people who already deal with a lot of technologies, so using the Web is pretty easy for them." (See list of Web addresses on page 18 for Novagen and a selection of other life-sciences companies.) While life-sciences companies hope to reap the commercial benefits of a Web presence, it is their customers-ordinary, workaday scientists-who have perhaps the most to gain. By using company Web sites, scientists can simplify a variety of tasks, including comparison shopping for reagents, checking a company's stock price, downloading vector sequences, and keeping up-to-date on important litigation. One of the first science-based companies to establish a Web site was Fullerton, Calif.-based Beckman Instruments Inc., the venerable manufacturer of scientific and clinical instruments. Stephanie Ann Starkey, a Beckman marketing communications specialist, notes that standards for the use of the Web have evolved dramatically even within the year Beckman has been online. "We got on there last January, and people were saying, 'Don't even think about trying to advertise on the Web.' The Web was up there for technical exchange of information, and the thought of doing anything beyond that was pretty much taboo. Six months after that, there was a lot of commercial information about products and services and things like that. PIONEER: Arnold Beckman, founder of Beckman Instruments, peruses his company's Web page, one of the first to be established by a science-based firm. "So we look at the Web as a kind of a living thing that grows and changes rapidly. You have to reassess constantly what you're doing. As it changes, you have to be prepared to meet your customers' needs and to respond to what they like to see and what's beneficial to them. That's really why we're on the Web, as a tool for our customers to use." For example, Beckman has long expended a great deal of effort in developing what the company calls "applications": detailed explanations suggesting uses for its instruments in particular scientific endeavors. "We saw the Internet as a prime opportunity to share some of that information and some of the work that Beckman's done throughout the years," says Starkey. Among the many things on Beckman's Web site are the full text as well as detailed bibliographies of many applications in the fields of analytical ultracentrifugation and capillary electrophoresis. According to Starkey, this type of comprehensive applications information will be added for other instrument lines-starting with spectrophotometry-in the coming months. Taboos against advertising on the Web have fallen, and almost every company Web site now includes the type of information long available in advertisements, brochures, and annual reports. But the more savvy of the life-sciences companies have realized that they need to put up more than pretty pictures and marketing literature to please their customers. INFORMATION PLEASE: Promega Corp.'s Web site offers the equivalent of 3,000 printed pages of technical material. (Click on image at left for full view) "If 'location, location, location' is the mantra for real estate, I think it's 'content, content, content' for a Web site," comments Mark Blumenfeld, vice president of information systems for Promega Corp., a Madison, Wis.-based manufacturer of enzymes and reagents. "The things of most importance to our customers are our technical bulletins and our technical manuals," notes Blumenfeld. "We have the equivalent of over 3,000 printed pages of our protocols [on the Web site]. Whether they're a customer or a prospective customer, if they're curious about how one of our products work, they can actually get all of the technical information we make available. And that has proved to be extremely popular with our customer base." Also popular on Promega's Web site is a section containing detailed information on the progress of Promega's legal battle with pharmaceutical powerhouse Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. of Nutley, N.J., over the licensing of the enzyme Taq polymerase, a subject that's important to every molecular biologist using the polymerase chain reaction. In 1992, Hoffmann-La Roche filed suit in Federal District Court in San Francisco against Promega as well as more than 40 individual scientists, alleging that they all violated patents belonging to Hoffmann-La Roche. The suit is as yet unresolved. Thomas T. Aquilla, a postdoc at the University of Vermont Medical College in Burlington, is one of those molecular biologists. "I have a personal interest in Promega's lawsuit with Hoffmann-La Roche, so I've accessed their page more than once to try to keep abreast of what's happening. It's very informative. They provide a lot of information going back to the very beginning of this fiasco. I think they do a good job of making this information available to the general public." Martin Leach calls this kind of information a "magnet," and says that such magnets are critical if a company wishes to attract scientists to its Web site. Leach should know. A graduate student in molecular biology at the Boston University School of Medicine, Leach has examined company Web pages with a critical eye for the last year. Starting with a simple file containing the E-mail addresses of just 50 companies, Leach developed his Biotech Registry into a highly useful list containing searchable Web-page and contact information for more than 600 companies in the life sciences. Nearing the end of his graduate studies and too busy to continue updating the registry, Leach recently turned maintenance of the list over to a company called Biological Data Transport in Danville, Calif., where the registry now resides (http://www.data-transport.com). "A good Web page gives out a lot of tech support information," explains Leach. "It's got to have high-quality intellectual content. If they sell DNA vectors, and they give a vector sequence, that's good. When they give detailed information that the scientist wants, that's good. If it's a searchable Web site, that's good. If you go to a Web site and there are 50 Web pages you have to wade through to find a certain article or a certain price list, that's tough." The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) home page is a good example of a Web site that makes it easy for scientists to put their hands on relevant information in seconds. The Rockville, Md.-based nonprofit organization maintains thousands of different cell lines and recombinant materials, and on the top level of ATCC's Web site is a simple but powerful search engine that allows a visitor to zero in on any keyword in any of ATCC's many Web pages within seconds. "A good Web page allows the customers to find what they want easily, makes it clear where the information is, and passes them on to the next appropriate site if there's another link they need to have," explains Donna R. Maglott, an associate staff scientist in ATCC's bioinformatics department. "It's another way of providing customer service 24 hours a day." One of the reasons that the World Wide Web has enjoyed such a rapid growth in popularity-compared to other useful Internet tools such as gopher (which allows an individual to "go for" conveniently organized text information) and telnet (which allows someone to log on to a remote computer)-is that the Web makes it easy to transmit graphical information. Many Web sites have been constructed with beautiful and useful photographs, illustrations, and diagrams, but the most commonly voiced criticism of certain Web sites is that their designers have overdone the graphics. "Obviously, a picture is worth a thousand words, but not if it takes five minutes to load," says Kristi K. Dohner, a technical writer at CLONTECH Laboratories Inc., a reagent company based in Palo Alto, Calif. "When I'm on a Web site, if I have to wait while they download a picture of their building or their president, it just makes me impatient, and I don't want to be there," complains Diane Beery, marketing communications manager for Stratagene Cloning Systems, a La Jolla, Calif.-based company that devises and manufactures biologicals and equipment for the life sciences. "If they give me a lot of marketing hype, I'm not going to go there again." "Graphics are good, but they're over-emphasized," maintains Martin Leach. "You've got to be able to compensate for the people who have poor access. Not everyone is at a university that has a [high-speed data] line. You've got to think of the modem users." "I don't have a need for most of the graphics," concurs Aquilla of the University of Vermont. He goes on to point out that the increasing use of large illustrations is "one of the things that's causing a big slowdown in the Internet overall. So many people are putting graphics online, and we're passing around all this digital information that's superfluous, in my opinion." Not everyone agrees that all pretty pictures are superfluous. Steve DeGraw, director of sales and marketing for the imaging division of Oncor Inc., a genetic technology company in Gaithersburg, Md., believes that even for hardnosed scientists, "there's really entertainment value there, and you want people to come back to your page." And graphics not only make the page pleasant to look at, but also can convey important information. "Sites that are just electronic brochures, that are just an electronic version of what's available in print without any added features, are not very useful," agrees Promega's Blumenfeld. "You have to add services that take advantage of the medium, and not just reproduce something in a slightly different format." According to DeGraw, Oncor has found a happy medium in the often competing desires to make its Web page useful, attractive, and quick to load. The key to this is the first page a visitor sees. "You want the front page to load fast; otherwise, they're just going to turn it off and go on to something else. Keep it simple and functional, without a lot of extra graphics to distract you. From there you can branch out to more complicated things." Users who find large illustrations annoying may wish to adjust their Web browsers to default to a no-graphics mode. (In Netscape, for example, one can remove the check mark from "Auto Load Images" in the "Options" menu.) Web pages load dramatically faster this way, and the browser places small icons where the illustrations would have been. If a user decides he or she wants to see the missing image, all it takes is a click of the mouse. Another solution is for the designers of Web pages to give visitors a choice of how many illustrations-and of what type-they wish to view. Novagen and CLONTECH, for example, each make catalogs and newsletters available both in standard HTML (hypertext markup language-the lingua franca of the Web) and in Adobe Acrobat format. Both formats include pictures and text, but the illustrations tend to be of higher quality in the Acrobat format, which additionally gives a look that's identical to the layout of the printed page. While the Acrobat format is quite attractive, the files take significantly longer to download than the corresponding HTML files, and they can't be viewed unless one has previously downloaded and installed the Adobe Acrobat reader program. Fortunately, this program is easily available-and for free-on Adobe's Web page (http://www.adobe.com/). In a recent "Doonesbury" cartoon, advertising man Mike Doonesbury has been assigned to create a Web page for his company. He asks a computer guru what's on a Web page. "It doesn't matter," is the reply. "Build it and they will come." "What's my motivation?" asks Doonesbury. The reply: "Fear, greed. Take your pick." Some companies may be motivated largely by fear and greed, while others seem to give very little thought to presenting valuable information. However, the vast majority of company Web pages surveyed by The Scientist provide a good deal of value to both the company and its customers. Ruth Iliff, director of corporate relations for Boehringer Mannheim Corp., a diagnostic and pharmaceutical company with United States headquarters in Indianapolis, expects that her company's new Web page will both decrease the firm's internal workload and lead to better customer service. "If someone calls in by telephone and says they need a materials safety data sheet, first of all somebody has to take the phone call, somebody has to write it down, somebody has to pick up the hard-paper copy, put it in an envelope, and mail it," she points out. "If it's in there and online, and all [customers] have to do is come in and get it-we're saved work, besides giving better customer service." CLONTECH's Dohner notes that a prime advantage of the Web is that "we can update information as it changes. We print our catalog once a year. Once that's printed, if there are products that are released or deleted or changed, that can't be changed in the printed catalog. But the catalog that's on the Web we keep up-to-date on a daily basis if necessary." Moreover, says Promega's Blumenfeld, "Since what we're offering is extensive technical information, if you want to update it in a print format, what you'd like to do is get rid of everything you've printed to date and issue the new documents. On the Web site you just repost it, and that's extremely appealing to us." Other Web pages provide extra value by posting career opportunities. Perkin-Elmer Corp., a scientific instrument maker based in Branchburg, N.J., for example, recently had details on 52 open jobs listed on its site. Midland Certified Reagent Co. of Midland, Texas, not only provides a utility to calculate the mass of any oligonucleotide, but also lists the phone numbers and Web addresses of 33 competing oligonucleotide suppliers. Pharmacia Biotech AB, a manufacturer of enzymes and nucleotides based in Uppsala, Sweden, provides hypertext links to other sites of interest to life scientists. And ATCC lists its upcoming technical conferences and allows Web-page visitors to sign up for them on the spot. Still, not everyone is convinced of the value of the Web. Austin, Texas-based Ambion Inc., which sells products for RNA analysis, detection, and purification, doesn't have a Web page of its own and is in no particular hurry to establish one, according to Frederic A. Rhoads, vice president of sales and marketing. "Our business is basically direct mail. We have no sales reps in the field. So the only way we ever get to know a customer is if they contact us and tell us who they are. The Web, at least most sites, tends to operate rather anonymously. Is the pendulum swinging back to the dark ages, where we used to say, 'Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door'? I don't think that's the case. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now, with or without the Web. "Essentially [the Web] is like putting a stack of newsletters outside the office door, closing the blinds, and three months later going out and finding all the newsletters gone, and saying, 'I hope somebody buys something.' "We mail a substantial amount of [printed] newsletters every month," continues Rhoads, noting that he can associate an individual name and address with each newsletter recipient. "I don't believe that I can get that kind of reach [on the Web]. A newsletter is an extremely scannable vehicle. A customer can go through my 16-page newsletter in under a minute and figure out if there's anything in there he wants to spend any time on. There's no way you can duplicate that on the Web today. The medium is excruciatingly slow from my point of view. Somebody could have gotten halfway through my newsletter in the time one graphic loads." Ambion has experimented with a Web page based at Cold Spring Harbor's BioSupplyNet ( http://www.biosupplynet.com/bsn/bsn-pag/bsn-mpag.htm), which claims to have information on 15,000 products from 1,600 suppliers. As a test, Rhoads used BioSupplyNet to announce a two-for-one offer on its RNaseAlert RNase detection dipsticks. In two months he received not a single inquiry based on this offer, although during that same period he sold 500 kits at full price through other channels. "Does this mean that the people who browse Cold Spring Harbor are not the buyers?" he asks. "Does this mean that not enough people are browsing the Cold Spring Harbor site? If I had my own Web site, would I do any better? I don't think so." Despite his skepticism, Rhoads expects Ambion to establish its own Web site-with content yet to be determined-sometime later this year, partly because of the forceful recommendation of his own scientific advisory board. With even skeptics like Rhoads expecting to bow to the necessity of a Web presence by the end of the year, the World Wide Web seems certain to continue developing as a place to find information on scientific instruments and products. As Beckman's Starkey says, "I think the Web is a really valuable tool, and the wonderful part of it is it's growing and changing and customers have a say in what they see." If the explosive growth of the year just past is any indication, Web enthusiasts are more likely than the naysayers to rule the day. Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., is online at finn@earthlink.net. Sidebar:Web Addresses of Selected Life Sciences Companies

Scientists Benefit As Life Sciences Companies Stream To The Web

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