November 2001

Thank you to all of those who completed the questionnaire.

In response, the first thing I have done is to incorporate hyperlinks from references into PubMed. This gives access to abstracts of papers. For a few papers, it may in turn allow you to get to the full manuscript, particularly if you have a subscription to the journals and have been issued with a password.

I find that it works faultlessly from home. But at work, my hospital blocks direct hyperlinks. I will try to find out how and why, and whether they will lift the block. You may need to do the same for your hospital. One work around is to right click on the reference. This will bring up a properties button. Click this and you will see a box which includes the address (URL) of the PubMed page. Copy this and paste it into your browser. I find this works at the hospital and gets me to the abstract. The URL is three lines long, so make sure you copy all of it, by holding down the left mouse button while scrolling over the area of the address.

I would appreciate feedback as to how many of you have Internet access from your desk at work and whether the link to PubMed works.

Other responses as to what should be included varied considerably. Within the field of immunohistochemistry, I am uncertain whether to venture outside of the realm of diagnosis into the developing prognostic use of markers such as Ki-67, p53 and cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors.

Some want me to concentrate on immunohistochemistry. Others want a wider range of information, possibly with images. All of this is technically straightforward. The problem is the scale of the task. I suspect that this project is not really do-able by one person. The question is therefore where I go from here. The conventional solution would be to invite "experts" to write each organ-system while I retain the role of coordinating, cross-referencing, compiling and distributing. There may well be scope for a more "democratic" approach, with voluntary contributions by anyone who wishes to submit pages. (Registrars could put their contribution on their c.v.) The problem then may well be the difficulty of maintaining the overall structure. Ideally, all histopathological information should be in the form of HTML pages, from which each pathologist "rolls their own" compilation. The most radical solution of all would be to place all of the source files in the public domain, so anybody with the pathological and technical knowledge can compile a working version, tailored to their own vision of what is needful.

10th November 2001

P. S. I am well aware of the existence of IMPOX toxicity but the dependency of the few does not negate the support that it provides to the many. See Spark, R. P. Dreaded disorder of IMPOX toxemia hits pathologists. Human Pathol 2001;32:1142-3.