On this site I intend look at ideas related to biotechnology and in particular bioinformatics, and hope to do so in a way that will make these subjects accessible to those with no prior knowledge of them. Biotechnology is playing an increasingly important part in our lives, and we need to learn about it in order to make sure it goes in the right direction.

Note that I am not a professional in this area - my background is in mathematical physics and computing - and so the creation of this site is more about me trying to learn about the subject than about trying to teach it to anyone. I plan to look at various diseases and how new bioinformatic ideas can be used to tackle them, as well as trying to understand what is going on in our bodies at the scale of proteins and DNA. I hope that you'll join me on this journey.

See Why Bioinformatics? for more reasons why you should take an interest in this subject.

The name of this site comes from combining the words Open and Pharmacology and it is based on the premise that we should all have access to new biotechnological developments. In particular I would welcome a more open approach to pharmecuticals, but I don't want to be too dogmatic about this. Intellectual property law is valuable in many contexts and I see this as a topic for discussion rather than a foregone conclusion.

Here are some of the questions I intend to look at on this site:

• How much can non-professionals be involved in the advancement of biotechnology and the study of bioinformatics.
• How can we make sure that the advances in biotechnology convert into products to benefit us all
• How far should we go with biotechnology - do we all want to live forever?
• How should intellectual property law apply to biotechnology - is the current scheme a help or a hindrance in it's development?
• How should basic research in biotechnology be funded - should the bulk of the money come from drug companies (meaning that they will own the results) or should more funding come from public sources.

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• Opharmia.org (this site)

• Opharmia Blog (coming soon)

I intend this to be predominantly concerned with subject area of this site, but it will have my ideas on other things (mathematics, physics, computing, economics ...) as well.

• Quantropy books(Coming very soon)

  I read quite a few books, and on this site I give my opinion about what I read, as well as commenting on books that look interesting, and on books which turned out not to be so interesting after all.

• Quantropy.org

  This is a repository to which anyone can submit an academic paper. It didn't really catch on, and I'm reluctant to push it too hard, since that might result in me getting lots of crackpot papers to deal with, but you're welcome to submit a paper if you wish.

• Tachyos.org

  This site explores the use of web based computer programs in discussing scientific and mathematical concepts. My future explorations in this area are likely to be biotechnology related and so will appear on the opharmia.org site.

• Chronon.org

  This is a site of blog like articles and book reviews. In future I'll probably put such thoguhts into the Opharmia blog and I will move the reviews to the Quantropy books site