[Internet in scientific investigation]

In the United States all universities, public libraries and most colleges are equipped with rooms containing computers connected to the internet, with free access for both investigators and pupils. The web is the new frontier of telecommunications, particularly regarding science and especially medicine.

One of the applications giving most popularity to the Internet is the World Wide Web system, a graphic environment which permits users to explore the information contained on the Internet, and which grows daily. The rapid access to well organized information is essential for genetic, epidemiological and clinical studies. Today, for instance, genetic investigation is unimaginable without the Internet. In the literature, one often finds specialized investigation which has been developed using the Internet, from which epidemiological data, examples of analysis or sophisticated programs for the presentation of results were obtained, or volunteers recruited for pharmacological studies. The internet gives access to articles published in 5,000 medical journals alone on the databases Medline and Embase.

The availability of information and the ease of communication using the Internet is a prerequisite for scientific work and investigation in many disciplines. Internet is a means of enrichment, and in the future will be even more so, when the information which it contains can be more strictly selected by the users.