Most people here will know John Furber's company Legendary Pharmaceuticals and his pioneering effort in aging research from a systems biology perspective.
I sadly forgot that I had talked to John during SENS4, and he told me he is looking to improve his well-known and frequently updated Systems Biology of Human Aging Network Model (see picture below; chances are good that you've encountered it before). Ideally, John Furber would like to enhance this model with cross-references to various biomedical and genomic databases, citations and other types of rich meta-data. An image-map of this model would not work, however, since the model is updated on a frequent basis and hence its graphical representation changes.
Possibilities to do this might range from XML-based representations and using OWL (semantic web ontology web language) to any better design ideas you might have. Your mission, if you accept it
would be to talk with John and decide on the specifics of implementation. Additional biological/bioinformatics knowledge is optional but would mean you'd be involved in deciding which databases and other meta-data could be linked to the model. You would start as volunteer programmer on a basis of honorable acknowledgement, however I'm sure that it would greatly increase chances of working with Legendary Pharma, as well as being well-known and appreciated in the life-extension community. Feel free to discuss here and/or contact me or John Furber directly (johnfurber at LegendaryPharma dot com).The first person willing and able to do this would get the lead on this project. This task would require some commitment to help maintaining the model, but should be of easy-medium diffculty for anyone with programming and web development skills.
If you're not able to do this, please consider asking any friends with programming skills, time and motivation. Thank you!
Edited by Mixter, 31 October 2009 - 03:44 PM.
