Internet for Scientists (ePub)

Kevin O'Donnell was born in Bathgate, Scotland. He graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1984 with a microbiology degree and went on to complete a PhD at University College of North Wales in Bangor on hydrocarbon-degrading plasmids in Pseudomonas. Writing up his PhD thesis provided his first real encounter with a computer - an Amstrad PCW word-processor. Having completed his thesis, and convinced that he had exhausted all of the possibilities offered by computers, he sold his PCW. A few years later he discovered Microsoft windows and found that computers were actually fun to use and could do all sorts of useful things which made life easier. Then he gained access to the Internet and found that it was full of resources of interest to scientists but that it took a long time to find them all. Kevin O'Donnell is head of the Diagnostics and Molecular Biology section at the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency, Edinburgh. He is a member of the Society for General Microbiology, International Society for Plant Molecular Biology and British Society for Plant Pathology. He is the author of 'Molecular Diagnostics Resources on the Internet' in Molecular Biology-based Methods in Clinical Diagnosis, U. Reischl ed., Humana (in press). Born near Niagara Falls, in Canada's southern Ontario, Larry Winger had a traditional rural upbringing in what could be called The Great Mid-West. Primary education in tiny, single-room red-brick schoolhouses turned into expansive secondary education in prosperous suburban Pennsylvania. Success in science projects turned into summer employment in a research lab in California, developing the earnest young scientist successively into laboratory technician, graduate student, and post-doctoral researcher. Larry learned BASIC and FORTRAN by remote teletype in 1970, spent the summer of 1971 programming statistical tests by punch card on an unappreciative mainframe, and purchased his first Apple computer (the 2 plus) in 1981, when he was a poor,