Making research engaging and accessible.
Early in 2016 my fathers Parkinsons took a turn for the worse. He was no longer able to walk, let alone type. The race was on to get his knowledge onto his site. He was suddenly hospitalized and subsequently put into a home. This quickly became a major rescue mission with significant challenges. The original site had been lost when the domain and hosting were no longer being paid for after the site’s owner went into a care home. It took two years to track down and extract some data from the original site. On top of this he had much of the information in his head and he was in the end stages of Parkinsons. Other data was simply listed on paper. Four people took on the task of extracting as much information from him, updating the information with information from recent discoveries, providing photos of specimens and getting it input on the site. A special thanks goes to Bruce Ott, Neil McDaniel, and Henry Reiswig (July 08, 1936 - July 04, 2020). I could not have done it without you.
Since getting it up on line there have been a few amazing and unforeseen benefits. One of these is being able to help researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina find accessible specimens to further their research into the novel biomedical compounds of the demosponge, Latrunculia (Latrunculia) austini that show promise for treating cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer.
We did not have the luxury of doing a formal analysis and plan for the site and the research team. The time had to go into getting the information online and available as fast as possible. Once the site was up, it became clear that defining the group would enable people to access the team for additional information, submit new discoveries or (hopefully) become contributors.
The idea behind the logo was to create a mark that offered the viewer to make their own discovery of what the mark said.
