Molecular diagnostics resources on the Internet

Busy diagnosticians need to know what is useful, and what is dross, when dealing with the internet. From the comprehensive array of resources that characterizes the offerings available via the world wide web and email correspondence, in particular, this chapter seeks to identify the most useful tools for the diagnostics laboratory. With rapid communications and fast internet consultations only a few keystrokes away, there really is no point in wasting time on fruitless searches when professionals are so accessible. But accessibility carries the weight of responsibility as well, and communications must be engaged with a fair modicum of civility and common courtesy. Responsibility is a crucially important component of public or semiprivate communication in terms of your own identity, and that of the organization that you represent. Recognition of the relative vulnerability of individual machines to the worldwide disseminated computer viruses, worms, or trojan horses currently abounding, for example, is perhaps the most important step in your approach to security issues, but this recognition must go hand in hand with institutional steps to protect the organization of which you are a part. Organizational tools that serve the diagnostician well in the laboratory can also be mobilized in the aid of communications through the net, and always that harbinger of understanding, common sense, should prevail in one's dealings both with machines, and the people who are communicating either directly or indirectly through them.