A laboratory notebook (colloq. lab notebook or lab book) is a primary record of research. Researchers use a lab notebook to document their hypotheses, experiments and initial analysis or interpretation of these experiments. The notebook serves as an organizational tool, a memory aid, and can also have a role in protecting any intellectual property that comes from the research. [2]
The guidelines for lab notebooks vary widely between institution and between individual labs, but some guidelines are fairly common, for example, like those in the reference. [3] The lab notebook is typically permanently bound and pages are numbered. Dates are given as a rule. All entries are with a permanent writing tool, e.g., a ballpoint pen (though a permanent marker may be undesirable, as the ink might bleed through multiple pages). The lab notebook is usually written as the experiments progress, rather than at a later date. In many laboratories, it is the original place of record of data (no copying is carried out from other notes) as well as any observations or insights. For data recorded by other means (e.g., on a computer), the lab notebook will record that the data was obtained and the identification of the data set will be given in the notebook. [4] Many[ who? ] adhere to the concept that a lab notebook should be thought of as a diary of activities that are described in sufficient detail to allow another scientist to replicate the steps. In laboratories with several staff and a common laboratory notebook, entries in the notebook are signed by those making them.
To ensure that data cannot be easily altered, notebooks with permanently bound pages are often recommended. [5] Researchers are often encouraged to write only with unerasable pen, to sign and date each page, and to have their notebooks inspected periodically by another scientist who can read and understand it. [6] All of these guidelines can be useful in proving exactly when a discovery was made, in the case of a patent dispute. It is worth noting however that following March 2013, lab notebooks are of limited legal use in the United States, due to a change in the law that grants patents to the first person to file, rather than the first person to invent. [7] The lab notebook is still useful for proving that work was not stolen, but can no longer be used to dispute the patent of an unrelated party.
Several companies now offer electronic lab notebooks. This format has gained some popularity, especially in large pharmaceutical companies, which have large numbers of researchers and great need to document their experiments.
Lab notebooks kept online have started to become as transparent to the world as they are to the researcher keeping them, a trend often referred to as Open Notebook Science, after the title of a 2006 blogpost by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. The term is frequently used to distinguish this aspect of Open Science from the related but rather independent developments commonly labeled as Open Source, Open Access, Open Data and so forth. The openness of the notebook, then, specifically refers to the set of the following points, or elements thereof:
The use of a wiki makes it convenient to track contributions by individual authors.
Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has foundations in applied mathematics, chemistry, and genetics. It differs from biological computing, a subfield of computer engineering which uses bioengineering to build computers.
An electronic lab notebook is a computer program designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. Lab notebooks in general are used by scientists, engineers, and technicians to document research, experiments, and procedures performed in a laboratory. A lab notebook is often maintained to be a legal document and may be used in a court of law as evidence. Similar to an inventor's notebook, the lab notebook is also often referred to in patent prosecution and intellectual property litigation.
PLOS Computational Biology is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering computational biology. It was established in 2005 by the Public Library of Science in association with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in the same format as the previously established PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine. The founding editor-in-chief was Philip Bourne and the current ones are Feilim Mac Gabhann and Jason Papin.
Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
Pendleton Read Montague, Jr. is an American neuroscientist and popular science author. He is the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke, Virginia, where he also holds the title of the inaugural Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor. Montague is also a professor in the department of physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Open-notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'dark data'. The practice of open notebook science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research and general media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open notebook science can therefore be described as part of a wider open science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of open access publication, open data, crowdsourcing data, and citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of open-source software and draws on many of its ideas.
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy is a volunteer computing project that runs on the BOINC platform.
Integrated information theory (IIT) attempts to provide a framework capable of explaining why some physical systems are conscious, why they feel the particular way they do in particular states, and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious. In principle, once the theory is mature and has been tested extensively in controlled conditions, the IIT framework may be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree it is conscious, and what particular experience it is having. In IIT, a system's consciousness is conjectured to be identical to its causal properties. Therefore it should be possible to account for the conscious experience of a physical system by unfolding its complete causal powers.
The ISCB Overton Prize is a computational biology prize awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biology either through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.
The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award is an annual prize awarded by the International Society for Computational Biology for contributions to the field of computational biology.
Olga G. Troyanskaya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology in NYC. She studies protein function and interactions in biological pathways by analyzing genomic data using computational tools.
Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University.
The ISCB Innovator Award is a computational biology prize awarded annually to leading scientists who are within two decades post-degree, who consistently make outstanding contributions to the field, and who continue to forge new directions. The prize was established by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2016 and is awarded at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference. The inaugural recipient was Serafim Batzoglou.
ISCB Fellowship is an award granted to scientists that the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) judges to have made “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. As of 2019, there are 76 Fellows of the ISCB including Michael Ashburner, Alex Bateman, Bonnie Berger, Steven E. Brenner, Janet Kelso, Daphne Koller, Michael Levitt, Sarah Teichmann and Shoshana Wodak. See List of Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology for a comprehensive listing.
Robin Angus Silver is Professor of Neuroscience and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at University College London. His laboratory studies neurotransmission and artificial neural networks by combining in vitro and in vivo experimental approaches with quantitative analysis and computational models developed in silico.
Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Laxmi Parida is an IBM Master Inventor and group leader in computational genomics at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a book by American mathematician Richard Hamming. The book comes from a course Hamming taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The book was originally published in 1997 by Gordon & Breach. It was republished in 2020 by Stripe Press.
Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.
Eftychia ("Effy") Vayena is a Greek and Swiss bioethicist. Since 2017 she has held the position of chair of bioethics at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETH Zurich. She is an elected member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences.
