BioWeb has its origins in 1995 at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. Alex Reeder was working on an Independent Study supervised by Dan Miller in Biology. The project was to use GCC (GCC is a database containing sequenced gene information on different species) and compare the Cytochrome C gene between several prechosen species. Finally, the results were to be published into a web page.

A semester past, and the Independent Study was completed. Earlier in the semester an advertisement for ThinkQuest was recieved by James Kombe. ThinkQuest is a contest offering a grand prize of 25,000 dollars in scholarships. First a web page in an academic category must be submitted. (English, History, Math, Science) Since Alex had already done work on the Cytochrome C project, he recruited Jon Wilcox to aid in the task ahead.

Together these two friends spent the spring and summer of 1996 preparing BioWeb. The project was online for submission in August. Back in '95 neither Alex or Jon knew that Netscape was not case sensitive; meaning test.jpg loaded the same as test.JPG. Thus when the project was uploaded to ThinkQuest's server none of the images, and some links failed. BioWeb was not considered for a prize because of this oversight, which was not discovered until 1997.

BioWeb was abandoned for a year so Alex and Jonathan could keep their sanity. After six months of searching Alex found a permanent site where BioWeb could be stored: Earlham's Computer Science webserver. Alex then went through the old sections and improved the design and HTML, which was not extremely refined in 1995. (Not that it is now either, but its better.)

Alex Reeder is the administrator of Bioweb. If you have any problems or suggestions please send them to him. The 3-D graphics were produced using Ray Dream Designer by Alex and Jon.

Alex Reeder
odo@cs.earlham.edu
http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~odo/

Jonathan Wilcox
louis_nifong@geocities.com
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Realm/5584/

BioWeb would like to thank the following people and publications for their aid and support in making this project happen...

Dan Miller (Head Coach)
James Kombe (Coach)
Rick "Dr. of Destruction" (Moral Support)
Dr. Forrester (Using GCC)
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary - Tenth Edition.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Modern Biology. Orlando, Florida. 1991.
Raven and Johnson, Biology. St. Louis, Missouri. 1989.
Earlham's faithful Computer Science webserver.

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