ResearchGATE: revolutionising social networking for scientists

Alexander Fleming was haunted by what he saw during World War I. A captain in the British Army's Royal Army Medical Corps, Fleming toiled to treat the savage wounds of soldiers, and felt the futility of using antiseptic. Antibiotics had yet to be discovered and in the battlefield hospitals of France, Fleming saw how often sepsis caused death and how antiseptics did more harm than good. The Nobel Prize winner's discovery of penicillin came by accident years later and would spawn a massive pharmaceutical industry with treatments for previously incurable conditions such as syphilis, tuberculosis and gangrene.

Imagine if Fleming was connected to a broad network of scientists via a pervasive technology like the Internet? ...Connecting scientists across time and space is no longer a problem these days, thanks to the Internet and a niche social network called ResearchGATE, described as a "Facebook for scientists" by founder Ijad Madisch.

A researcher in radiology at Harvard University, Madisch co-created ResearchGATE after receiving a scholarship to study at the Ivy League university and discovering that social networks didn't offer the bespoke tools he needed for scientific collaboration with the colleagues he had left back home in Germany.

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