Capitol Building, Madison, WisconsinRYANWICK VIA FLICKR
A bill currently awaiting approval by Wisconsin's legislature could jeopardize data-intensive research projects at the University of Wisconsin by effectively forcing the school to withdraw from high-speed networks, such as Internet2, that link universities around the world.
“Virtually all our science-based traffic...flows through that network, so it would be catastrophic,” said Paul DeLuca, the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One project at risk is the Protein Structure Initiative, which collects and shares x-ray crystallography and protein structure data among over a dozen institutions. The National Institutes of Health, which funds the project, requires participating universities to share data with researchers at other institutions, said Brian Fox, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and head of the Transmembrane ...
