Research at the Intersection of the Physical and Life Sciences (2010) / Chapter Skim
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2 Grand Challenges
2 Grand Challenges
Pages 12-19
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From page 12... ...
These are questions whose answers not only will transform our knowledge of the physical world, but also will substantially impact our society. The committee does not claim that these five grand challenges are the only areas for investment, as there are many areas that could benefit from collaborative attention from the physical and life sciences.
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From page 13... ...
Other ideas from the physical sciences, such as dynamical systems theory, energy landscapes, and multistability, are helping to explain fundamental issues such as how organisms behave in response to their environments and how information is used to sustain life.1 Using the knowledge gained in these and other studies, we face the ambitious possibility of generating synthetic units with basic attributes of living matter such as compartmentalization, metabolism, homeostasis, replication, and the capacity for Darwinian evolution. Such self-replicating, evolving organisms have the potential to create more efficient functions for a broad range of applications.
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From page 14... ...
Unraveling the mys teries of how it works is one of the greatest of challenges facing the scientific world, and the tools and ideas developed in the physical sciences will play a pivotal role in this undertaking. One promising approach to understanding the brain is the reverse engineering of neural circuits.
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From page 15... ...
The physical sciences are particularly adept at developing tools to meet some of the most significant needs -- namely, new methods of high-resolution, high-throughput microscopy and imaging to monitor the functions of the brain components, ideally in the intact brain. One key challenge is to trace the thinnest neuronal wires (100 nm and less)
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From page 16... ...
Interactions between DNA elements introduce a combinatorial wealth of possibili ties for stringing sequences together to impart complex patterns of gene expression. Deciphering the logic of gene regulation will require theorists, at times drawing on theoretical constructs originally developed in the physical sciences, to work hand in hand with molecular biologists.
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From page 17... ...
Increasingly powerful computer models can link, for example, the global climate with site-to-site variations in the biological parts of the global carbon cycle, which, in turn, feed back to the global climate. Spacebased sensors provide access to a growing set of observations at regional to global scales, facilitating the coordinated analysis of, for example, shifts in the locations of the major biomes, changes in the distribution of pests and pathogens, changes in regional water balance, and feedbacks to climate change.
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From page 18... ...
The modeling capabilities and tools of the physical sciences will play a critical role in such studies. Diversity appears in the natural world at many levels.
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From page 19... ...
Now, in an era of rapid global changes driven by human actions, the role of diversity and the processes that maintain diversity take on dramatic new importance. Many kinds of human impacts on the natural world, especially landscape fragmentation, climate change, pollution of air, soil, and water, and stimulation of biological invasives, threaten to decrease biological diversity.
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