To meet, to gossip

The web has transformed the way scientists search for information, but its potential as a tool for scientific collaboration is still largely unrealized. The BIONET newsgroups prove that even 1960s technology can support some kind of intelligent discussion, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) shows that large-scale, realtime communication is also possible across the net, but for serious use and constructive collaboration, something more is needed — an infrastructure. Biology has a head start in this extremely active area of research, thanks in large part to the efforts of Gustavo Glusman, creator of BioMOO. BioMOO’s strange name is a reflection of its strange origins. “OO” stands for object-oriented, while “M” stands for MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon. Although Glusman prefers to call it a ‘Multi-User Dimension’, the roots of BioMOO are firmly in the role-playing game systems developed in the mid-eighties which kept students up into the early hours, destroying dragons and casting spells on gremlins. This same technology has been brilliantly adapted by Glusman to provide a collaborative environment for biologists. In BioMOO, scientists can wander around the system’s various ‘rooms’, holding private meetings, giving public seminars, or just chatting, conversing with other users by typing in realtime. During BioMOO’s early development, it was predominantly used by structural biologists and bioinformaticists — the same technologically literate group of biologists which was first to exploit the internet. These users were not intimidated by the command-line interface which at that time was the only way to access BioMOO. Indeed, they revelled in the powerful programming language built into BioMOO, which allows customised ‘objects’ and ‘robots’ to be created within the BioMOO environment. But this kind of interface is not adequate for the more general user. For BioMOO to really take off in the wider biological community, the alltext interface needs to be supplanted by a more intuitive, visual approach. BioMOO has already progressed a long way in this direction. The best way to use BioMOO right now is to have both a terminal window and a web window open and pointing at the BioMOO site. Each window reflects the changes in the other, so if you are in a seminar room and type a command on your terminal to display your second slide, your web browser and those of all the other users watching your presentation will be updated to show the ‘slide’. Conversely, you can wander up and down a virtual poster session using the web window to move from poster to poster, and the terminal window will follow your movements so that when you get to something you find particularly interesting, you can engage in real-time text chat with the poster’s author. Very soon it should be possible to make full use of BioMOO through the web alone. As web browsers become more and more adept at handling 3D graphics, and real-time audio and visual communication, BioMOO will increasingly be an effective alternative to international travel, whether for meetings, collaboration on books or papers, or even for evaluation of job and fellowship applications. All of which is good news for graduate students who currently despair of tracking down their peripatetic advisers. As well as allowing researchers to hold on-line meetings and conferences, BioMOO has already proved its value as an educational tool. In 1995, Peter Murray-Rust and Alan Mills organized a course, run from Birkbeck College in London, entitled ‘Principals of Protein Structure’. The course was taught exclusively via the internet, making extensive use of BioMOO, and the experiment was so successful that the 1996 course has academic accreditation and participants are to receive an Advanced Certificate from London University. Finally, amid all this lofty discussion of collaborative environments, it would never do to ignore that most vital stimulus to human communication — the need to gossip. Martin Leach’s ‘Biotechnology Rumour Mill’ fills just this gap. Admittedly it has its share of rather dull corporate announcements, but it also contains a sprinkling of genuinely interesting tittle-tattle. Contributions are welcome — the more scandalous, the better. If necessary, they can even be submitted anonymously.