A full report of this meeting will appear both on this website and in an issue of Human Mutation. The 30 attendees first heard Dr. Rick Firestone speak on the Nuclear Science Database. This was established 60 years ago and began in a similar way to the locus specific database community with individual researchers publishing their own databases. In the 1970's a working group was established and protocols and formats were adopted to produce a standard database with evaluators reviewing the data.
Support is from universities, government agencies and private publishers.
The latter charge for hardcopy dissemination of nuclear data. Experience shows that researchers who joined the new system found that they were able to get more done by joining a collective effort than was formerly possible when each operated his or her own separate facility. Many researchers have also used the new community-wide facility to make their own, more specialized databases bigger and stronger than would otherwise be possible. The situation is the 1970's is strikingly similar to our situation in the late 1990's. Many were concerned that the system was to be totally handed over to industry or a central body and that the community would lose control.