Researchers to compile Earth's 'book of life'
Over the next 10 years, they vow to gather information about the planet's 1.8 million species and make it available on the Web free of charge.
By Tom Regan | Columnist of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the May 16, 2007 edition
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It will be called the "Encyclopedia of Life." And it is, as they say in Boston, wicked cool.
Imagine a website where you can research, or just read about, every living thing on earth, from a microbe that lives next to an underwater volcano to a California redwood tree. A website where you can even add your knowledge of some life form or species.
Over the next 10 years, researchers vow to gather every scrap of information available about the planet's 1.8 million known species of animals, plants, and other organisms. And once the information is gathered, it will be available on the Internet entirely for free.
This project has been initiated by five top US universities and institutions of higher learning: Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.; The Field Museum in Chicago; the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Other scientific institutes, like The Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Garden in England, will make their vast collections of historic records available through the encyclopedia.
"I'm really excited about this for a number of reasons," says Prof. James Hanken, who heads Harvard's involvement in the Encyclopedia of Life. "As a scientist, it's a tremendous resource for people who study biology professionally. And it will be a real help to anyone who will need information in a hurry."
And while it will be useful to universities and scientists worldwide, Professor Hanken also says it will also be a real boon for K-12 education.
"Kids just gravitate to this kind of thing," he says in a telephone interview. "If we keep it accessible and helpful and cool, they will use it all the time."
The project is the dream of several top scientists, including renowned Harvard biologist and philosopher E.O. Wilson, who described such a project in a widely read essay written in 2003. In a news release from Harvard last week, he said that since he first put the idea forward, "science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before."
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