The Semantic Web and the Knowledge Grid are recently proposed technological solutions to distributed knowledge management. Early experimental applications from the Life Science community indicate that the approaches have promise and suggest that this community be an appropriate nursery for grounding, developing and hardening the current, rather immature, machinery needed to deliver on the technological visions, which thus far have been dominated by technological curiosity rather than application-led practicality and relevance. Further necessary developments in theory, infrastructure, tools, and content management should and could be steered opportunistically by the needs and applications of Life Science.: