Okay, I admit it. I am a scientist wanna-be. As a little kid, I liked to page through the Edmund Scientific catalog and daydreamt about becoming a famous chemist. Such intriguing, mysterious products. For old times’ sake I just visited their site and was suffused with nostalgia to see such items as the Brew Your Own Root Beer Kit and Moon Blob Gel. Biocompare is a grown-up version of that. It is a actually a rather fascinating way to explore science and one that high school teachers trying to get kids interested in the subject might want to visit.

I found Biocompare’s Promotions page quite interesting and actually rather amusing (e.g., “Don’t waste time and money on a secondary antibody..” Sound advice.) It also is a quite useful discovery tool.

For instance, it had an item on the new Science 2.0 social networking site, ResearchGATE:

which is the latest entrant in the social networking for scientists space. See also Biomedexperts

on which nothing much seems to be happening—hard to get excited about social networking platforms which seem to be moribund.

What seems to be the case with sites like both ResearchGATE and Biomedexperts is a blind faith in “Build it and they will come.”  In the case of ResearchGATE we are told in a blog posting dated October 13, 2008:

“…we are happy to introduce ReFind, a new search engine based on semantic, “intelligent” correlation – the first of its kind! It enables you to find groups, papers, fellow researchers and everything else within and outside of ResearchGATE without having to read through dozens of irrelevant results. Just type a few sentences into ReFind or simply copy and paste your abstract and ReFind will roam through databases such as PubMed for you. Automatically, it will show you connections to fellow researchers, groups and other ResearchGATE resources, based on the profile data you provided. This is true web 3.0!”

I really do wish ResearchGATE well. But at this point, it doesn’t seem to be attracting much activity of note. And a blog posting or two every few weeks doesn’t inspire confidence in it as a magnet for excited researchers. Thanks to Biocompare, at least I was able to check out ResearchGATE.

Now, getting back to Biocompare. It has interesting features, although there are some gaps in its coverage. For instance, I wanted to search for some of the products marketed to those researchers studying genes related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But the listing for “Disease – Neurological Browse for genes/proteins involved in Neurological disorders” didn’t include ALS although SOD1 is listed in the Alphabetical Listings of Genes (via which you can search for products connected to that gene).

It was quite difficult to tell how active the fora are (e.g., Most Recent Posts were dated with today’s date, but many of the posts appeared to be from several years ago).

The listing of Events on Biocompare was useful e.g., a notice of a meeting on Neurodegenerative Diseases that whisked me to the site of the conference itself:  http://meetings.cshl.edu/meetings/degen08.shtml

The Featured Articles page had some rather useful combo promotional/educational pieces on general topics such as Genome Analysis and Transgenics. Again, high school or community college instructors might find such bits of science journalism useful for enlivening up classes and showing kids what products they might actually work with in real-world settings.

Biocompare has sister sites such as Medcompare. It is surprising how interesting and “sticky” business to business sites can be if the content has some substance. I have just spent far longer, for instance, exploring the various features of Biocompare than I expected. I thought it would be a quick look-see and out. But I actually stopped and read quite a bit and watched some of the videos (e.g., Web Seminar: Integrating Genomic and Genetic Data to Gain Insights into Complex Neurological Disorders from Agilent Technologies—always useful to stop and learn a little bit about daunting subjects). Below is a passage from Biocompare’s About Us page. Biocompare has an interesting business model and it might want to develop a “Young Scientist” page for high school kids in order to capture the interest of teachers and through them young people–its future customers:

“Biocompare is the leading resource for up-to-date product information, product reviews, and new technologies for life scientists. Biocompare combines an in-depth knowledge of life science products and new technologies with the power of the Internet to offer scientists the most dynamic, relevant, and innovative media-based marketplace for life science information. Produced by scientists, Biocompare’s mission is to provide free, time saving services to life science researches, allowing scientists to find and learn about the technologies that drive discovery. Biocompare does this by providing specialized search tools, articles, product reviews, webinars, videos and technology spotlights all designed to ensure that Biocompare remains a trusted and comprehensive source of product information. Biocompare continually strives to serve the life science community by providing new and improved online services that facilitate product discovery and technology education.”