Global trend...

The reason for Fiji National University’s preoccupation with digital infrastructure is two-fold. The first is that universities now operate in a globally-interconnected scientific ecosystem. Researchers can access journals, books and databases online from anywhere in the world, communicate and collaborate with other international researchers and present their findings to a global network of colleagues through videoconferencing and webcasts. One of the earliest, and still the best-known, examples of the way that digital connectivity has created a globally-integrated scientific

community was the international project to map the human genome. The goal was to determine the DNA sequence of the entire euchromatic human genome, so that researchers could begin to understand the function of each of the 22,300 protein-coding genes in human beings, allowing them to customise drugs for individual patients and improve the efficacy of medical treatments. The global team of researchers was based in 20 different research centres and institutes around the world, including the United States, the UK, France, Japan, Germany and China. By working together over a period of almost 13 years, sharing the same database and pooling their results as they collectively sequenced and identified the 3bn chemical units that make up the human genetic instruction set, they finally completed the project in 2003. The gene sequence is now available in an online database which can be freely accessed by researchers anywhere in the world who are working on advanced medical treatments.