Notebook
The British terror invasion; RIP: BioMedNet, 1995-2004
The British terror invasion
Some European imports have never been welcomed with open arms in the United States, particularly in these days of EU trade wars and Freedom Fries. The rabid tactics increasingly used by a hard core of animal-rights extremists must rank among the least welcome trends to cross the Atlantic in recent times.
A clear sign that something new was afoot came in early June during the Biotechnology Industry Organization meeting in San Francisco. Animal and ecological rights groups, said FBI special agent Philip Celestini, are now the country's leading domestic terror threat. In a talk the Financial Times said left audience members shaken, Celestini said US animal extremists are now using "what we call the European strategy, because it was used first on the continent of Europe and quickly spread to the UK and then the US."
"The FBI was a little slow to respond to the threat," admitted Celestini. "But as we noted the escalation in violent tactics, we had no choice but to divert resources from other pressing matters. We now have agents in San Francisco and 35 FBI field offices nationwide addressing animal terrorism."
In Britain, people with even distant connections to animal-testing firms are all too familiar with enduring harassment, property damage, and violence at the hands of animal activists. In April they even formed a support group, Victims of Animal Rights Extremism (VARE). "People targeted in this way suddenly find that normal life becomes impossible," says a VARE spokesperson. "They need to talk to others who have suffered at the hands of the extremists to find out how they coped and lived through this frightening experience."
In Britain, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) is the group that most prominently focuses its attention on companies or individuals who have business relationships with the primary target of its fury: Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). When US federal authorities arrested seven members of SHAC-USA, an offshoot from the original group, in May, they charged them with conducting a campaign to "terrorize" employees of companies associated with HLS. The indictment says that SHAC-USA recommended the "top 20 terror tactics" on its Web site, including vandalizing property, firebombing cars, physical assault, spraying cleaning fluid into someone's eyes, smashing the windows of a target's home, and threatening to kill someone's partner or children.
Although FBI agent Celestini says the United States has been slow to react to the problem, the United Kingdom, which has struggled for years with violence from animal activists, still hasn't managed to get a proper grip on the situation. Piecemeal legislation to stop violence and intimidation hasn't prevented the few dozen real extremists from going about their nasty business. What some scientists and the drug and biotech industries want dearly is for the government to bring in a single, specific new piece of legislation, along the lines of the laws Britain uses against football hooligans.
Polls show that the majority of Britons understand the need for animal research, although most feel other options need to be exhausted first. With this in mind, the UK government decided this year to set up a center to focus on replacing, refining, and reducing the use of animals (the "3Rs").
Some British scientists fear that in doing this, the government is somehow giving in to the activists. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, says championing the 3Rs is "like giving away the ace of spades before you start playing poker. It's selling out to the antiscience brigade by conceding that there is something intrinsically wrong with research on animals."
On the other hand, it seems that appropriate attention needs to be focused on minimizing the numbers of animals used in research and on improving their treatment. In this context, mainstream animal-rights groups are a proper and welcome part of a public debate on the issue. It is also vital that they are not tarred with the same brush as their extremist counterparts.
RIP: BioMedNet, 1995-2004
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of regular BioMedNet users, you'll know that the Web site went dark on June 30, after nine years of creating a large and vibrant community of life scientists, based on content such as a bookstore, mouse knockout database, PubMed, and a biomedical database. (If you're a regular reader of The Scientist Daily News online, you'll know that we reported the coming demise in December.) The abridged story of the once wildly successful site is worth repeating at a time when publishers are still grappling with what works and what doesn't on the Web, and because so many scientists and others felt so warmly about BioMedNet's offerings.
Vitek Tracz dreamt up what would eventually become BioMedNet in the early 1990s, before the Internet had really taken off. On a US trip in the very early days of the Web, Tracz decided to move BioMedNet to the Internet. Sometime after BioMedNet was born, Tracz--now CEO of BioMedCentral and The Scientist--tapped Sarah Greene, who had created interactivity at Current Protocols, an updateable, loose-leaf series of methods volumes, to work on the site.
Speaking of Current Protocols, "We had little pink reader-response postcards--yes, cards that you actually post by mail!--providing corrections or suggestions for tweaking the protocols that one could only know from slaving away in the lab," recalls Greene, former CEO of BioMedNet and Praxis Press and now director of publishing and new media at the New York Academy of Sciences. "We had t-shirts as rewards, with the slogan 'Never Clone Alone' that biologists really loved, but the only way to get one was to submit a postcard that helped the book get better."
It was a simple idea, but Current Protocols "exemplified how a community of like-minded persons could use their common experience to create a whole that is bigger than its parts," says Greene. "You can see how the Internet, which provided a powerful combination of immediacy and searching/filtering vast amounts of data, would prove to take this idea of community publishing or ultimate interactivity to new and undreamt of levels."
"Although the word community is bandied about, one shouldn't forget that it's really the focus on the individual, the representative unit of the community, that made BioMedNet stand apart from other Web sites," notes Greene. "The idea of the individual scientist purchasing a single article was revolutionary in those days and still might seem so today, given the ultimate demise of that publishing model." The central idea was to create a community site, with registration, for the biomedical research community, so that scientists could find and communicate with one another easily. The site would then become a platform for publishing that would address individual scientists, rather than libraries or institutions having the purchasing power.
Tremendous risks were involved in creating this new business model, including convincing publishers to join in. "To invest up to [£20 million] in a project without being able to see a way of making money out of it, one must either be mad or a genius," wrote The Bookseller when Tracz invested in Electronic Press, one of the companies that was developing BioMedNet. "Vitek Tracz, chairman of the Current Science group, who has done just that, would appear to be a bit of both."
At the time, Tracz called the model "the most efficient system for buying or selling information, but because there are no existing models, we do not yet know how to make money from it. But money will be made; we will find a way. But to start with we will have to let things go cheap or free." He reminded the magazine of an old Polish saying: If you're going to fall off a horse, make it a big one.
BioMedNet certainly became a big horse, even if it was Elsevier, who bought the site in 1998, and not Tracz, who eventually fell off. Membership of the site grew from 50,000 in 1997, to more than 500,000 by 2000, and eventually to over 1 million. Much of that success was due to the fun side of BioMedNet, the award-winning webzine HMS Beagle. "By generating a news service and also bringing in general-interest debates, reviews, profiles, and career advice, and by relating biology back to the bigger worlds of culture and policy, we were able to provide a unique 'lounge' or common ground for the special-interest groups that comprised [BioMedNet's] primary constituency," says Greene.
In the end, it was business that sealed the fate of the site. There's good reason to think that BioMedNet's focus was too different from Elsevier's thrust on library sales. "BioMedNet's main role has been as a tool to market our life science products," Elsevier writes in a message on the site. "After careful reviews of the costs and benefits involved, we have decided to concentrate marketing resources into what we believe to be more efficient methods. We also believe that the investment saved can be channeled into the continued development of existing platforms such as ScienceDirect."
We'll see. The ideas behind BioMedNet and the HMS Beagle have given rise to a host of admiring imitators. In that sense, BioMedNet will live on.
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