Fast Company: He Struck Gold on the Net (Really)

J.W. Bizzaro • June 2, 2002

Fast Company: He Struck Gold on the Net (Really)

This story is about geological rather than biological data, but the analogy to free and open bioinformatics is obvious:

``In January 1848, a work crew at John Sutter's mill, near Sacramento, California, came across a few select nuggets of gold. Before long, a half-million prospectors arrived there seeking instant riches. The gold rush was on. Some 153 years later, another gold rush broke out at an old mine called Red Lake, in northwestern Ontario. This time, the fortune hunters wielded geological-modeling software and database mining tools rather than picks and shovels. The big winners were from Australia. And they had never even seen the mine.

``Rob McEwen, chairman and CEO of Goldcorp Inc., based in Toronto, had triggered the gold rush by issuing an extraordinary challenge to the world's geologists: We'll show you all of our data on the Red Lake mine online if you tell us where we're likely to find the next 6 million ounces of gold. The prize: a total of $575,000, with a top award of $105,000.

``The mining community was flabbergasted. `We've seen very large data sets from government surveys online,' says Nick Archibald, managing director of Fractal Graphics, the winning organization from West Perth, Australia. `But for a company to post that information and say, `Here I am, warts and all,' is quite unusual indeed.''

Full story:
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/59/mcewen.html

Reference by Slashdot.

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