Biological moon shot: realizing the dream of a Web page for every living thing

Science News,  Feb 2, 2008  by Susan Milius

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Richard Pyle hasn't gotten a congratulatory crate of free diapers. But he's one of the fathers, in a sense, of the first fish species named in 2008. Quintuplet species even. The journal Zootaxa posted descriptions of five damselfish on Jan. 1 that Pyle and his colleagues at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu found using a specialized mix of gases to push beyond the depth limits of conventional SCUBA gear.

In a few weeks, the rest of us will be able to catch up on such frontiers of exploration a lot more easily. A sweeping informatics project called the Encyclopedia of Life is scheduled to launch its first trial entries on the Web in late February (SN: 5/12/07, p. 294). According to the plan, the encyclopedia portal will provide access to roughly 30,000 Web pages of specialists' data--one page for each of the known species offish.

And that's just a baby step. Unveiled in May 2007, the Encyclopedia of Life project envisions such powerful tools for managing and centralizing biological information that a decade from now anyone visiting www.eol.org should find the Mother Nature of all encyclopedias: easy access to a Web page with definitive, current information on each species on Earth.

No one can say how many Web pages that total coverage \ will need. The encyclopedia's godfather, biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, speaks of 10 million. "It should be thought of as a biological moon shot" he says.

He and his fellow encyclopedists argue that if they realize their ambitious dream, they'll change the science of biology. They propose that the new informatics methods and centralized Web portal will speed up the old, underfunded business of figuring out what's what (or who's who) among living things. And the speedier tools will drive novel inquiries, including an expansion of the study of networks, such as food webs, and the search for evolutionary patterns.

Planners also hope it's not just for science. Using the new tools to climb the tree of life should be fun--for scientists as well as for poets and plumbers and kids.

ROOTS Like flying to the moon, making one encyclopedia of all life is an old idea that technology might finally make possible.

The urge to produce an overarching view of living things goes back at least to Aristotle. Even the idea to make that long list in Latin with two names for each species goes back more than 250 years, to Carl Linnaeus' foundations for biological nomenclature. Hence, Wilson wrote in an early proposal for the encyclopedia, people "assume taxonomy all but wound down generations ago."

Not true. So far scientists have given formal names to only about 1.8 million species. Published estimates for the actual number of species on Earth range from 3.6 million to upwards of l00 million--numbers based on extrapolations and a fair bit of outright guesswork. In many ways, taxonomy has barely begun.

According to Wilson, the number of known frogs and other amphibian species has jumped from 4,000 to 5,400 over the past 15 years. New plant species join the roster at a rate of about 2,000 a year.

These measures reflect only the first step of naming an organism. How it lives, what it eats or gets eaten by, and whether people might find it useful or dangerous or charismatic often remain unknown. Yet the growing human population redirects the fates of these species, pushing some toward new habitats and others toward extinction.

"We're sailing blind into our environmental future, Wilson told attendees at the 2007 TED conference, a gathering of luminaries in technology, entertainment, and design. Wilson's pitch marked the opening night of the current effort to upgrade biological information tools.

After several years of behind-the-scenes campaigning, Wilson and other planners had secured seed money for the project: $10 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A consortium of museums and other science institutions is organizing to get the job done.

FISH FIRST At one of those institutions, the Smithsonian in Washington,

D.C., the encyclopedia executive director, James Edwards, is in charge of seeing that this moon shot doesn't fizzle.

Sample encyclopedia Web pages show flashy images and videos plus links to the latest genetic sequences and a scan of the page of the book in which the first published description of a species appeared. Cool, yes, but time-consuming. Developing entries of that quality for millions of species will take years, and Edwards doesn't want the world to lose interest in the meantime.

So, the encyclopedia will release something fast, but just a small something: a portal to basic info on fish. The creators will present the pages as a work in progress, soliciting user comments.

Visitors will be able to admire a portrait of the zebra turkeyfish and a map of its range in the Pacific, for example, or learn that the white-spotted boxfish typically frequents tropical waters 1 meter to 30 m deep. The modern Latin names will be paired with tables of common names in dozens of languages.