Venkat Jagdish, a Indian-born computer whiz, is now upgrading GENESIS--the last version, GENESIS 2.0, was shipped out in August of 1996. He is currently working as part of the Genesis Development team to redesign and evolve GENESIS 3.0, and assessing the feasibility of using JAVA, the computer language devised by Sun Microsystems. One major advantage that JAVA provides over others is that it is portable across multiple computer platforms and operating systems, according to Jagdish. Moreover, the networking capabilities of the language could potentially provide the mechanisms for a modeller to develop his/her own customized GENESIS tools and make it easily available for use to any interested GENESIS user on the Internet.

Meanwhile, in another room in the Bower lab, Jenny Forss is concocting the scaffolding for a vast database that will ultimately contain all the models generated by research labs. Indeed, the field of neuroscience has undergone absolutely explosive growth in the past decade, with labs all over the world generating massive volumes of anatomical and physiological information. This database is designed to capture this information so researchers can use it to devise models of real biological structure. When it's finally completed several years hence, it will be a virtual library of computer generated models of neural structures.

Right now, scientific papers don't contain everything researchers discovered -- like everyone else, they like to put their best foot forward and present only best results. But the Bower lab would like to somehow get all the data -- not just what has been distilled from experiments -- to glean as much information as possible from real world experiments in order to create simulations that closely approximate real life.

The work has just begun, and Bower may not see his idealized version of GENESIS online until after the millennium. If it works as planned, though, it may turn out to be the Bower lab's most lasting legacy.

--Linda Marsa