Hello Shinobi Gaiden,

Yes, your suggestion was placed in the Consolidated Feature Wish List thread a long time ago.

I suppose that it is so late that I will do everything tomorrow that I meant to do today. So I might as well expand on my reply.

When the HPF Project began, it was curiously indefinite. For a long time there was no report on how much of the project had been completed. Then Dr. Bonneau suddenly reported that proteins from a number of species, such as malaria, had been added to the project. The web page about the project at the ISB was edited to mention other species. Then we finally started to get status updates detailing just how much had been done, how much was in progress and how much remained to do.

So it seems that Dr. Bonneau had expansive ideas about just what to do, but needed time to get permission. Until then, he avoided making any promises that he might have to break. Just recently, he managed to add the plant Arabidopsis to the list. It will take some time for us to learn just how much that adds to the project. My own guess is about 10%. Earlier this year he made some trips to lecture at NYU. Apparently he was also conferring with the plant biologists there. At least, that is my guess.

But this points out something that we have to keep in mind - scientific research projects are a bit opportunistic. They follow the old military adage - Reinforce success; starve failure. I doubt that our very first project will prove to be unique this way. So we might want to make the Project Scientists take the heat and bear the responsibility for explaining sudden changes and twists in their project. At least the Statistics give one objective measure of how much has been done on a project. The Project Scientists can then expound on how much remains to do and try to justify any surprises they give us.

But in conclusion - - Yes, we are going to have to think about how to make it easier for people to follow our progress. This is a current weakness and it will only get worse once we have multiple projects to follow. I am thinking of posting a thread in Start Here: Community-maintained FAQs as a stop-gap once we start a new project.


mycrofth