New papers on biological principles and mechanisms appear on a daily basis. May it be necessary or useful to attempt an approach like the Beilstein for Chemicals and Chemistry on a "ten years back" basis? Or do you think specific reviews in the respective fields cover this issue?
In principle, this idea having a Beilstein-like resource to compile and collect biological knowledge would be very intriguing. However, to shed some light on the dimension of realization of such a project and with regards to potential difficulties, I'd like to draw attention on some (provocative) arguments.
(1) For the Beilstein Handbook (and later database) of organic Chemistry facts on chemical compounds were collected, evaluated, compiled and finally published. Facts in this sense means published and proven properties such as structure, masses, density, melting and boiling points etc. and these were real facts.
In contrast, knowledge in biology is based on probabilities rather than facts even though the rates of probability can reach more than 90%. But biological facts cannot be equalized to chemical facts since the properties of e.g. benzene do not change, whereas the properties of e.g. an enzyme can appear fuzzy and thus need a lot of efforts for curation and maintenance.
(2) There are a lot of databases in the biochemistry field for e.g. proteins and enzymes, carbohydrates, nucleotides etc.. The curators of these databases are suffering from the fact that collecting data from the literature is extremely time-consuming and expensive since those data are not complete, sometimes unreliable, non-comprehensive and contradictory. And even these data are just collected without any furhter evaluation, the user of such databases has to judge over the quality of this data and to arrange it in the corresponding context. Which, in turn, can be extremely difficult since many papers lack a comprehensive description of the materials and methods used.
(3) Instead of creating a "Beilstein" for biological principles I'd suggest an alternative way of publishing data: A curated Wiki-like "journal" could bridge the gap between publication flood and compiled biological knowledge. The basic idea of such a Wiki is to write a "never-ending" (?) story on specific topics by adding just the experimental results and interpretation of this data to already existing data in the same field.
Just my first ideas that came to my mind.
Dear Carsten,
I agree with most what you write, but my point is that we spend a lot of time discussing fraud, data manipulation using wildely different measures up to the point not knowing anymore what to trust and what not. I think its time for a less emotional and scientifically relieable resource for biological facts. I fully understand that this is a huge project and not very rewarding for those doing the work.
So your idea of a curated Wiki-like journal is great and some years ago I thought Wikipedia itself may be such a source one day...
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts on this!!
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