On his Nature Network blog, John Wilbanks entertains the idea of e-commerce for biological research materials. Whether plasmids, cell lines, mice or fish, such materials — a “treasure trove of implicit knowledge and encoded experience” — are hoarded by the owning lab for more publications, or simply decay from neglect after a graduate student or postdoc moves on. Imagine the benefits to scientists’ ability to build on published research, Wilbanks says, if an Amazon-style system existed where one could “search the web, drop in a credit card number, and get a cell line via fedex in four days”.
The unloved plasmid or the one-time cell line of the classic paper are currently: not findable online, not available by digital contract, not fulfilled by anyone other than the creator, and credited only by a citation. These four elements, Wilbanks argues, are needed to achieve “one-click” and could be fulfilled by existing search engines, standard contracts and repositories. The idea would be part of a research web to haul scientific tool-making out of the sixteenth century and into the network.
Nature 450, xv; 20 December 2007