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Newly appointed National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins will attend and speak briefly at the American Society for Cell Biology Conference in San Diego Dec. 5-9. Dr. Collins will provide some short remarks after Rudolf Jaenisch’s keynote presentation at 6 p.m. SDBN has requested an interview and hopes to give San Diego Biotechnology professionals a voice for the direction of NIH funding.

Dr. Collins led the Human Genome Project, an achievement which significantly changed the landscape of life science research. The project has found increasing relevance as the data becomes ‘translated’ into implications for health and medicine. The information has pervasively impacted the way our industry ‘works,’ just one example being the improved communication between drug discovery and disease diagnostics. Dr. Collins is also a physician and a proponent of personalized medicine, and was appointed as NIH Director by President Obama in July of this year.

Dr. Collins has been a strong supporter of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) for years, and is described as an ‘eloquent speaker and all around great guy’ by John Fleischman, Science Writer for ASCB. Fleischman said Dr. Collins has also been known to pick up a guitar and play at their functions. We know that Dr. Collins has a sense of humor because he has appeared on the Colbert Report. We can’t promise a ‘kumbaya’ session, or a funny rapport (pun intended), but it will be great to hear Dr. Collins talk about the direction of the NIH. The meeting is also a great place to learn and network with scientists and exhibitors, I highly suggest that you attend.

The ASCB is dedicated to basic research which is of paramount importance to supporting our local biotechnology economy, as our industry is fed by our top research institutions. Personally, I am interested in changes in NIH funding which will better prepare our academic scientists to more easily ‘translate’ their knowledge to industrial applications.

Do you have any questions for Dr. Collins? Please leave them as a comment below, and we will do our best to get them asked!

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A few times over the last week or so, I’ve been asked how many life science companies are utilizing social media. I decided to make a list, and I also have some hints and shortcuts for you so that you can get a head start. In this post, I am focusing on companies that have physical or software products for life scientists and biotech companies not classified as healthcare (e.g., Monsanto). Note that I also have some personal genomics companies listed–they’re a bit of a grey area, but personally I’m very interested in them, so I’m including them. I’ll also show you how to find scientists in social media and blogs, as the list would be too lengthy here. There is a very nice, complementary list of pharma and healthcare social media that can be found on Dose of Digital kept up expertly by Jonathan Richman. Both lists are dynamic, feel free to leave a comment below to add your company, and I know Jonathan is open to updates to his list.

Life Science Companies Using Social Media

You’ll notice that many of the companies listed below are small, as social media is a great way for them to get exposure inexpensively. The larger companies are starting to be more active, and I have talked with a few who are working out policies and procedures to implement. There are some great examples of companies providing interesting information and helping customers. Also, there are some companies who simply post special offers and don’t seem to ‘get it,’ but I’m sure in time, they will. If you want to get updates from all of the companies easily, check out the Shortcut section for the RSS feeds and email updates.

Life Science Companies in Social Media

Shortcuts

When we had our ‘Social Media for Scientists‘ event in May, we discovered that many of you feel as though you don’t have the time for social media. How can we help? Well, nothing really substitutes for diving in and experiencing it yourself, but there are some shortcuts we can help you with. If you need help with RSS, check out this post/video.

Shortcuts for Scientists in Social Media

NOTE: Spammers are everywhere, so use caution. If you begin to get ‘direct messages’ from the people we are suggesting to follow on twitter, simply unfollow and block them.

We hope that you find these resources useful, and feel free to comment or give suggestions below. There are other resources for scientists on social media, and we will try to cover them here–this is just a start. If you work for a life science company, now is a great time to get started, contact Comprendia for a free consultation to learn more.

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During our May 28th Social Media for Scientists (SMS) SDBN event, William Gunn talked about friendfeed as a useful tool for discussing science and learning. We polled the attendees before the event and found that they knew almost nothing about it, and had little interest in learning about it. We set up a friendfeed room for the group and frankly have not had much adoption.

So, what’s so great about friendfeed, why do we keep talking about it? Friendfeed aggregates all of your activity on social media, so that when you post anything on twitter, your blog, Flickr, etc. (58 social media applications are available), all of your connections there see it. Now, think of this used with a scientific ‘persona,’ if you will. You can share interesting articles, blog posts, presentations–some people even post data on Flickr–with your colleagues. Every post can be commented on, leading to interesting discussions. See this example of how friendfeed was used to stimulate and manage discussions regarding the conference, and the interest was so high that posts were thought to be spam!

Friendfeed takes it one step further, allowing you to form and join groups which focus on topics (see table below). You can benefit from group members’ posts, ask questions of the group, and take part in the discussions from any post. Scientists have been using the web to interact via forums and mailing list for a long time (we even discussed friendfeed vs. these older ways of communicating there). While someone pointed out that there is ‘nothing wrong with the old forums and mailing lists’ and that ‘you can post longer items using the old methods’ I see real value in the ‘2.0′ forms of communicating such as friendfeed. With these types of social media, as with media such as twitter, often people post interesting observations that lead to unexpected comments and new directions–there is a level of serendipitous discovery that occurs. Also, because the groups are full of like-minded people, there is not much noise, and even discussions that are tangential to your work can be interesting. As William Gunn pointed out in our SMS presentation, you can also search all posts and comments from your friends or groups, leading to one of the most targeted web searches available (bing, eat your heart out).

One thing that I find incredibly interesting is that these groups can also become commentaries on larger issues. See the References Wanted group below–it is a repository for articles that scientists cannot access freely, and thus a commentary on the need for more open access science, paradigms that journals such as PLoS subscribe to. In addition, you’ll find that the scientists on friendfeed are keen to learn about new tools–see the Evernote Addicts group, a group dedicated to software for aggregating information that scientists (and others) find very useful. As with other types of social media, it is not clear what the lifetime of friendfeed’s relevancy will be, but you can be sure that the people here will be ahead of the curve in knowing what the ‘next big thing’ for scientists will be, even if it means moving away from friendfeed or being a ‘force’ to help change it.

As with other social media, the best way to learn is to try it yourself. I suggest signing up and subscribing to the groups below, getting email updates for convenience at first. We realize that some of you are still hesitant to join, and that’s OK. It turns out that Facebook and friendfeed have a lot of similarities, as a fan page can be set up for a group of people, and items can be posted on and discussed among members. We set up a SDBN fan page for this purpose, become a fan and start posting and interacting! We hope that it will give you a ‘taste’ of ’serendipitous scientific social media’ and that you’ll be inspired to participate in tools such as friendfeed. We’ll also continue to help you learn more about the tools for science in social media through blog posts and events. As we mentioned at the SMS event, participating in social media gives you a way to get a ‘leg up’ from your colleagues in real time, and we think that once you start experiencing it, you’ll be as hooked as we are!

P.S. On friendfeed there is even a discussion on this post!

Friendfeed Groups for Life Scientists: Some Examples

Don’t see a group that interests you? Search the friendfeed groups for your research area or anything you’re interested in, or start your own!

Posted by Mary Canady of Comprendia, which helps life scientists and the industry improve communication through social media and marketing strategies. Special thanks to Sally Church of Icarus Consultants & PharmaStrategyBlog for helping with the list of groups, and to the friendfeed life scientists group, who let this ‘marketer in scientist clothing’ participate in the group. Also thanks to William Gunn, for help and convincing me to persist with friendfeed even though I didn’t ‘get it’ at first.