So how can those interested in the biotech field anticipate the next Amgen?
Information. All Science has to published prior to any kind of breakthrough. The 'Pubmed' site recently made available through NCBI is an extraordinary advancement. This site is not only information rich and flexible, the timeliness of manuscript (abstract) availability is unsurpassed. And it is free. Those who wish to invest in biotech ignore this site at their peril.
I will show you its power: say I'd like to know what has been published by those at Ariad Pharmaceuticals:
1) Go to the Pubmed site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/index.html). Notice the left column hypertext - for those truly adventurous, try 'advanced search'. This feature allows easy narrowing and cross searching and application of Boolean connectors.
2) Enter 'ariad' (case insensitive) in the search area and search. A page like this should be produced: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov . If the search was done ~10:30 EDT, 24 Aug. 1997, 48 references were found containing Ariad somewhere in the text.
3) Now here comes the impressive part: press on the hypertext of the author (King, WG) of the first citation: published in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology, AUGUST, 1997. You simply cannot find more up to date information at the press of a key than this.
Since most biotech threads have at least one 'scientist', SI surfers can bring this info back to their thread for discussion.
Best wishes,
Peter
Just for the record: the search described above produced quite a number of citations which contained an author named 'Ariad', an inappropriate result. A cleaner search approach: use the advanced search, under 'search field' choose 'affiliation'. For 'Ariad', this produces 20 hits, all of them correct. |
