How does an innocent scientist learn that bionet exists?

[Paul N Hengen]

dan at cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
>
>    Getting people to use bionet is a problem. It isn't one that is going
>to be easily solved. This is my experience:
>
>    There are two kinds of people in bio departments:
>         1) Those who use computers.
>         2) Those who use computers only when they must (like root canals).
>
>    Of computer users there are two kinds of people:
>
>        1) Those who read news and subscribe to mailing lists.
>        2) Those who don't.
>
>   For both questions, group 1 is much smaller that group 2. So those who
>are availible to read bionet are a very small minority. Further, this
>group contains almost no PI's.

One basic problem with getting scientists to read news is that they must
first learn to use a computer. This takes considerable effort and the
desire to learn a completely different language, ie. the mish-mash of
acronyms and buzz-words associated with such an undertaking...

BTW (By the way), What's a PI ???


Paul N. Hengen
National Cancer Institute
Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center
Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 USA