Two things caught my attention this morning and reminded me just how un-modern academic science is.

“In life science, it’s like a pre-internet world – maybe even pre-industrial.” Those are the words of one of NNB’s newest bloggers, John Wilbanks of Science Commons (though he’s blogging here as himself and not as a representative of SC), in his post today.

He talks about how difficult and inefficient it is for biologists to share materials (cell lines, plasmids, etc) and it’s a system that’s been in place for decades. He’s calling for the principles and technology behind e-commerce to be applied to science and the sharing of materials. Imagine if the movement of research materials between labs happened as easily and quickly as a lamp is bought and sold on ebay or a book on Amazon? “One click for cell lines”, as John puts it.

John promises to write more about this and I hope he’ll address the cultural issues that stymie free material sharing. Competing labs are not all that keen to give each other their valuable cell lines. What can funding agencies and journals do to get more scientists to share?

And here’s another way science needs to modernize: achieving gender equity among faculty, especially tenured faculty. The Globe today has a story about how, so far this year, MIT has granted tenure to just one woman professor (an economist, not a scientist), out of the 25 faculty members who were given tenure this year.

Now, of course, this is a problem across all universities but MIT does promote itself as being a leader in women faculty/women-in-science issues so it faces closer scrutiny. And MIT is lead by a woman, Susan Hockfield, so I would imagine the expectations for fast change to be higher.

MIT has made progress in hiring more women faculty since 1998 so given average tenure clocks, that will hopefully translate into more women getting tenure. But Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT who was so instrumental in getting these issues into the spotlight, said in the article: “We learned a lot about this problem, but good will and time do not solve that problem.”