Scientists Predict Internet Will Revolutionize Research

Already, they say, data exchange and E-mail are reshaping the way science is done--and this is only the beginning The vigorously expanding international computer network known as the Internet is changing the way science is done, researchers say. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly, the Internet is altering the way scientists interact with their data, with their instruments, and with each other. Moreover, investigators predict, as an ever-increasing flow of Internet-related support tools go online, such futuristic-seeming concepts as "tele-experimentation" and networked "collaboratories" are likely to revolutionize the global scientific enterprise. Editor's Note This article, the first part of a two-part series on the emergence of the global Internet as an integral part of science, looks at the proliferation of online communication and collaboration by E-mail, file exchange, and electronic publication. The second part, to appear in the May 16 issue, will explore the powerful new online information tools already available and the expected future for scientists of remotely controlled instruments and networked laboratories. Currently, the more ambitious efforts--such as those involving remote control of instrumentation or interactive multimedia consultation--are generally at the demonstration stage or under early development. Sophisticated online information resources, however, are already in daily use in many molecular biological research laboratories, for example, where they are considered virtually indispensable. Meanwhile, the Internet's ability to easily distribute texts is giving rise to a growing number of novel electronic-publication projects (see story on page 8). Most common by far is scientists' widespread use of the Internet to exchange electronic mail and manuscript files or to join discussions in specialized electronic newsgroups. Whatever their level of participation, scientists generally agree that the Internet has come to play an important, if not crucial, role in their research activities. "My entire operation has been transformed by Internet," says Robert Snyder, director of the Institute for Ceramic Superconductivity at Alfred University in New York state. The network allows him to keep in constant touch with his graduate students training overseas and with those at Alfred when he travels to conferences. He also uses the Internet to coauthor papers with colleagues in places as distant as Moscow and Eastern Europe. "In the past, using land mail, I had a couple of colleagues that I collaborated with internationally, but we couldn't do much," Snyder says. "Now, I have about 25 active collaborations going on around the world, because of Internet. I can't live without this thing." As useful as it has become, E-mail does not yet threaten to replace face-to-face interactions among scientists. The Internet's ability to quickly and inexpensively distribute texts and other information has led to a growing number of innovative electronic-publication projects. Una Smith, a graduate student in the department of biology at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., for example, wrote "A Biologist's Guide to Internet Resources." The guide, which is available over the Internet, discusses networking and information archives, and provides answers to frequently asked questions, such as "Where can I find biology-related job announcements?" With most publishing enterprises, it is clear which party is the publisher and which is the consumer. With the Internet, however, this distinction becomes blurred, Smith says. "It is easy, in the electronic medium, to step over the line from being a consumer or user to being a producer, once you know how," Smith says. "But the `how' is largely unwritten lore. And with respect to the various forms of [electronic] discussion group, the users are themselves the product." In addition to their hard-copy published versions, many journals are now also being offered in a downloadable online version. In addition, a growing number are available only in an electronic format. William Frakes, director of the computer science program at the Falls Church, Va., campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, for example, edits an electronic newsletter about the reuse of software components, called ReNews. The journal, published in affiliation with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is distributed solely through the Internet. Periodicals are not the only publications being distributed over the Internet. Textbooks and other reference works are also becoming available online. Jon Rothblatt, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., is coediting a book on genes and proteins of the secretory pathway. The book is scheduled for hard-copy publication, but updates will be posted to the Internet, so that owners of the book will be able to obtain the latest information. Companies interested in reaching scientists are beginning to take advantage of the Internet, also. For example, licensed users of MATLAB, an interactive numeric computational software package from The MathWorks Inc., of Natick, Mass., can now use the Internet to receive program updates. A variety of user-support information services are available online, including a library with specialized applications contributed by users. A electronic newsgroup has also been established for discussion of MATLAB-related topics. Subscribers to Reference Update, a weekly bibliographic update service for researchers, can now receive current and recent back issues via the Internet. The service is available from Carlsbad, Calif.-based Research Information Systems. "With a growing majority of our customers connected to the Internet, it became apparent to us that this powerful, high- speed communications network provides an excellent distribution medium," company president Earl B. Beutler said in a statement. Because the value of the service to researchers is dependent on the currency of the information it disseminates, instantaneous electronic publication greatly improves the product. Internet subscribers to Reference Update will receive information on the latest publications in their fields a week or two earlier than diskette subscribers-- often within a day or two of journal publication, he said. --F.H. "People do not rely on E-mail to initiate research projects, because, when they are planning their work, they tend to need and rely on more interactive and expressive forms of communication," says Jolene Galegher, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Galegher, who also has a Ph.D. in social psychology, has been studying communication, electronic and other, among scientists. With E-mail, she says, "they also report that they make slower progress than when they bump into each other in the halls every day. And, even though they have collaborated quite successfully and compatibly with someone, when that person moves to a new institution, it's very difficult for them to start new projects together [electronically]." The electronic newsgroups--used for discussions among people with shared interests--also have their limitations. From 1989 to 1992, Bruce Lewenstein, an associate professor of communication and science and technology studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., analyzed the messages of such a group devoted to cold fusion research. "For the most part, the people who were active participants in that group were not the people actually doing the work," Lewenstein says. "The signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that people who were seriously interested in cold fusion didn't bother to use that kind of public forum as a place to do their work." Still, because of its decentralized nature, the Internet is allowing geographically or otherwise isolated investigators to engage in cooperative research from which they might be excluded. In addition, those who might have found themselves at the periphery of the scientific enterprise in the past are finding new access to the process of science as the network's influence expands. "There's the possibility of re-enabling the talented amateur, for example," says William Wulf, AT&T Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "Except in astronomy, and maybe in some parts of botany, the talented amateur has just faded away, because you need all this infrastructure. But if the infrastructure is the Internet, it's a different situation." Wulf coined the term "collaboratory," when he was assistant director of the National Science Foundation in the late 1980s, to describe the interlinking through computer networks of geographically distant communications, information, and instrumentation resources. He was also a member of the National Research Council committee that produced the May 1993 report National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research (Washington, D.C., National Academy Press). "The same thing is true of faculty at four-year schools-- essentially, not players in most scientific discovery for the last four or five decades," Wulf adds. "You're going to see more of them involved." Karen Kwitter, a professor of astronomy at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., might count herself among this second group of investigators. She exchanges E-mail, data files, and manuscripts of papers with colleagues around the world daily via the Internet, she says. "One can now also apply for telescope time at Kitt Peak [National Observatory, Tucson, Ariz.] using their E-mail templates," she says. "I can state unequivocally that I could not do the science I do without the Internet." Striking examples of the Internet's value in facilitating scientific communication can be seen in the increasingly vital interactions between researchers in the former Soviet Union and their colleagues in the United States and Europe. Part of the reason for this is that the telephone system in Russia remains primitive and unreliable, making it difficult to place calls or send faxes. (Finnish engineers installed the system just after World War I, and it has remained virtually unimproved since.) Despite Russian efforts to upgrade the system recently, the Internet is now considered a necessary tool for joint international scientific work involving Russian scientists. Jan F. Chlebowski, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, for example, organized a conference on Russian biotechnology advances held in Richmond in November 1993. Discussions centered on issues of technology transfer, intellectual property, and industrial relations, concepts new to many of the Russian attendees. Although scientists from both countries traveled to visit with each other several times before the meeting, the Internet was pivotal in planning the conference, according to Chlebowski. It allowed organizers to circumvent the "rather cumbersome" telephone system and to accommodate the time-zone differences between the two countries. "Electronic mail is just a godsend in terms of being able to remain in continuous touch and develop collaborative research projects in a meaningful way," Chlebowski says. "The Internet really is doing what everybody says. It doesn't take a visionary anymore to see how this stuff works." Victor Ivannikov is director of the newly founded Institute for Systems Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. From his office in a 160-year-old building, academy member Ivannikov is engaged in collaborative projects with dozens of university and corporate researchers in Europe and the U.S. His only method of day-to-day communication with them is the Internet, according to Larry D. Wittie, a professor of computer science at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Wittie, whose office is across the hall from Ivannikov's, is currently spending a semester at the institute. "The Internet is what is keeping me sane and internationally productive," says Wittie. Through E-mail, he consulted with home-campus colleagues to develop a lecture he presented at Moscow State University. He is also working with a U.S.- based coauthor to prepare a paper for presentation at a conference in Poland in June. Wittie notes that, in addition to its greater convenience when compared to telephone calls, E-mail creates a permanent record of scientific communications, one that can be easily passed to others as needed. "The Internet ties the scientific world together," Wittie says. Alfred's Snyder coauthored a recent paper on superconductivity along with Leonid M. Fisher, a physicist at the Electrotechnical Institute in Moscow. The manuscript file was exchanged in a public-domain typesetting program called LaTeX, which allowed them to create and preserve equations and specialized formatting in the electronic transfer. "It involved two or three ping-pongs, back and forth," says Snyder. "When the last pong arrived here, and we were happy, we submitted it electronically." There is a touch of irony in the thriving online dialogue that has developed between Eastern and Western scientists. In the 1960s, Department of Defense scientists conceived of a command-and-control communications system that could, by using a decentralized organizational structure, survive a nuclear attack, thought most likely to originate from what was then the Soviet Union. The computer network that resulted from these Cold-War considerations grew into the Internet during the 1970s and 1980s and is now responsible for putting Russian scientists online.

Scientists Predict Internet Will Revolutionize Research

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