sad news (fwd)

[Judith Murray-Rust <j.murray-rust@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk>]

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 18:16:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Joel L. Sussman" <sussman@pdb.pdb.bnl.gov>
To: Judith Murray-Rust <j.murray-rust@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk>
Cc: "Joel L. Sussman" <jls@bnl.gov>
Subject: sad news

	25-Aug-98 
Dear Judith,
	I thought you would be interested to hear that  I just learned 
from Dr. Gerald Selzer (of the NSF) that the PDB will be transferred to 
Rutgers Univ. in Oct '99.
	Needless to say, I was really really shocked & surprised 
to learn of this decision, especially after seeing last month what
appeared to be a very positive reaction of the site visit committee 
to our presentation and future plans. It seemed to me that the committee
was particularly pleased with the:
* Results of the Layered Release Protocol - with the number of new 
  entries requesting 'on-hold' now down to only 20% and going down. 
* The fact that the PDB is now (based on its initiative) receiving close
  to 80% of the X-ray entries with structure factors.
* They also saw the extremely good interactions that the PDB has with
  the journals (as seen in recent editorials in PNAS, Science and Nature
  and the change in these journals policy w.r.t. to release of coords 
  upon publication - using the PDB Layered Release Protocol).
* They also were pleased with the as well with the way we were getting 
  industrially determined 3D structures to be made easily available to the 
  community like the HIV-DB (developed by Alex Wlodawer's group) through an 
  interaction with the PDB and specifically via the 3DB Browser tool
  (see below). 
* The very user friendly way to access the PDB via the 3DB Browser which
  has already become the standard for several online journals pointing
  to the PDB atlas pages of structures (in fact during the site visit,
  it became clear that the information presented there - is in some ways 
  clearer and easier to read than the methods sections in some journal 
  article!)
* That interactions/collaborations around the world were very beneficial 
  to the community, e.g. ligand/Het group submission (M. Hendlich & CCDC);
  non-bonded-finder (E. Martz) etc. and the 14 mirror sites to provide
  easy access to the PDB.
	In any event, I felt you should know and I would greatly appreciate
hearing from you, if you have any information, as to what was the basis of 
this decision.
	Best regards,
	Joel 

p.s. I thought you would be particularly interested in this, as I'm
     sure you've been able to observe the changes in the PDB during 
     the past few years and would not like to see any major perturbation.  
     Is it possible that the US Govt officials who made this decision did 
     not pay any attention to these enormous improvements? Hard to believe. 
     In any event, please feel free to share this msg with your colleagues, 
     even OK to redistribute via e-mail, but if you have time, try to 
     contact the three individuals below, who made the final decision,
     and ask them what is going on?  They are:

NSF:    Dr. Mary Clutter:       mclutter@nsf.gov
DOE:    Dr. Ari Patrinos:       Ari.Patrinos@oer.doe.gov
NIH:    Dr. Marvin Cassman:     mc56j@nih.gov

      Thanks very much -  joel