The White House gala was brokered by the elders of the scientific establishment. The lever presumably was a piece of a Nobel Prize. This is a great day. The courses will be designed for undergraduates at third-year level and above. Students will be able to interact with teachers and each other.
Video lectures are already available, and formal courseware modules are planned.
Butler, D. 2001. Bioinformatics to be nurtured online. The efforts also signal a much more collaborative type of science than has ever before existed. If Kovac, Couch, and others can pull off their grand bioinformatics projects of connecting the most brilliant minds in biology, they might turn out to be right that the impact of this new technology during the next decade will be greater than what we have seen so far from the Internet. What is required is a mechanism to enable communication between these relationships that leads to information exchange, adaptation and recombination.