*New Initiative on Biomedical Information S&T Urged
*NIHnet on vBNS

A panel of experts urged the National Institutes of Health (US) to take strong action and put special emphasis on biomedical computing. Several far-reaching recommendations were submitted to Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, on June 3, 1999. A few days after the "Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative" was announced, James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the US House Committee on Science, introduced a bill to boost funding on IT research. The bill, "The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act," entails much common ground shared by many disciplines. When passed, it shall allow the NIH to harness the energies of DOE and NSF, two agencies that provide strong support to computing and communications. The biomedical computing initiative brings into focus the urgent need for cross-disciplinary expertise in computing and mathematics and for scalable computer infrastructure.

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The NIH joined the vBNS community when NIHnet was connected on February 22, 1999. Scientists on campus and investigators funded by NIH can now conduct collaborative research via the high-speed Internet. Connections to sites outside the US will be possible through STAR TAP, the transit point in Chicago where international members anchor their links. This is an important implementation for the international partners of NIH and for the NLM, especially. Access to the databases and databanks the library offers will be facilitated. Biomedical researchers in Taiwan stand ready to establish further links.

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