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Appendix A - Statement of Task
Committee on A New Biology for the 21st Century:
Ensuring the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution
An ad hoc committee will examine the current state of biological research in the United
States and recommend how best to capitalize on recent technological and scientific
advances that have allowed biologists to integrate biological research findings, collect
and interpret vastly increased amounts of data, and predict the behavior of complex
biological systems. Among the questions the committee may address are:
• What fundamental biological questions are ready for major advances in
understanding? What would be the practical result of answering those questions? How
could answers to those questions lead to high impact applications in the near future?
• How can a fundamental understanding of living systems reduce uncertainty about
the future of life on earth, improve human health and welfare, and lead to the wise
stewardship of our planet? Can the consequences of environmental, stochastic or genetic
changes be understood in terms of the related properties of robustness and fragility
inherent in all biological systems?
• How can federal agencies more effectively leverage their investments in
biological research and education to address complex problems across scales of analysis
from basic to applied? In what areas would near term investment be most likely to lead to
substantial long-term benefit and a strong, competitive advantage for the United States?
Are there high-risk, high pay-off areas that deserve serious consideration for seed
funding?
• Are new funding mechanisms needed to encourage and support cross-cutting,
interdisciplinary or applied biology research?
• What are the major impediments to achieving a newly integrated biology?
• What are the implications of a newly integrated biology for infrastructural needs?
How should infrastructural priorities be identified and planned for?
• What are the implications for the life sciences research culture of a newly
integrated approach to biology? How can physicists, chemists, mathematicians and
engineers be encouraged to help build a wider biological enterprise with the scope and
expertise to address a broad range of scientific and societal problems?
• Are changes needed in biology education-- to ensure that biology majors are
equipped to work across traditional subdisciplinary boundaries, to provide biology
curricula that equip physical scientists and engineers to take advantage of advances in
biological science, and to provide nonscientists with a level of biological understanding
that gives them an informed voice regarding relevant policy proposals? Are alternative
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degree programs needed or can biology departments be organized to attract and train
students able to work comfortably across disciplinary boundaries?
The subgroup of the committee will organize a Biology Summit to garner input from a
broad spectrum of stakeholders—government and private agencies that fund biological
research, the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, universities and medical schools—to
consider barriers to progress and to highlight exciting new areas of research that cross
traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Summit’s proceedings will be published as a
separate, type-3 workshop report. In a subsequent consensus report, the committee will
recommend actions that federal policy makers can take to ensure that the United States
takes the lead in the emergence of a biological science that will support a higher level of
confidence in our understanding of living systems, thus reducing uncertainty about the
future, contributing to innovative solutions for practical problems, and allowing the
development of robust and sustainable new technologies. The committee will not make
specific budgetary or government organizational recommendations.
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