INTRODUCTION

To say that the rapidity of change on the World Wide Web has been extraordinary is an understatement. In less than 5 years, the Internet and the Web have gone from marginal technologies that were often derided to increasingly central information access points for millions of scientists, physicians, teachers, students, businesses, and others. Intellectual endeavors and economic life have likely only felt the first tremors of change. Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), those sometimes cryptic combinations of letters and dots (eg, http://www.whitehouse.gov for the White House), have become common elements in all forms of advertising and most publications. Large corporate interests are investing billions of dollars in this new medium. Dozens of innovative enterprises have been launched, employing thousands of highly skilled workers devoted to furthering Web technologies. Millions of dollars in stock transactions and consumer purchases are conducted over the Web each week, often more efficiently than by traditional means.

Undoubtedly, the children of tomorrow will be profoundly affected by changes to pedagogy being wrought by new levels of information accessibility and interrelation. In February 1998, the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine issued a recommendation for the "retooling of education at all levels, with the World Wide Web as the centerpiece."¹ It has gone beyond fad, and done so at a dizzying pace. In short, the Internet has turned out to be the best product the "computer nerds" have yet produced.

Of all its possible uses, the Web has arguably done its most important work to date in the collection and dissemination of medical information. Vast databases of medical literature and genomic, chemical, physiological, and biological research are now available to practitioners and researchers around the world. Cryosections of human cadavers can be viewed and downloaded over the Web, as can magnetic resonance images, radiographs, . . . [Full Text of this Article]