Mathematics and 21st Century Biology (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-11
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The main push in biology during the coming decades will be toward an increasingly quantitative understanding of biological function; the rate at which progress occurs will depend on a deeper, effective implementation of quantitative methods and a quantitative perspective within the biological sciences. The success of this transformation will depend in part on the creation and nurturance of a robust interface between biology and mathematics, which should become a top priority of science policy.
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Some chapters of the report are organized around the different levels of biological organization, but others -- including "The Nature of the Field," "Historical Successes," and "Crosscutting Themes" -- look more broadly at the commonalities of past and current applications of mathematics to biology. Recommendation: Funding agencies supporting mathematical research related to the life sciences should give preference to proposals that indicate a clear understanding of the specific bio logical objectives of the research and include a realistic plan for how mathematicians and biologists will collaborate to achieve them.
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Recommendation: Funding agencies supporting mathematical research related to the life sciences should give priority to re search that addresses intrinsic characteristics of biological sys tems that reappear at many levels of biological organization: high dimensionality, heterogeneity, robustness, and the exist ence of multiple spatial and temporal scales. Biological systems at all scales are characterized by high dimensionality, heterogeneity, robustness to perturbations, and the existence of strongly interacting, highly disparate spatial and temporal scales.
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RATIONALE FOR THE RECOMMENDATIONS The committee's recommendations are notable both for what they say and what they omit. There is, for example, no call in this report for a major initiative to develop an in silico cell or any other major, potentially multiagency initiative with a specified goal.
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High-performance computing impacts the whole range of research activities, from the low-level processing of raw data and the development of new theoretical frameworks to the organization, dissemination, and analysis of large biological databases. · The success of the Human Genome Project in establishing accurate, wholegenome sequences as central resources in biology.
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From page 6... ...
The Human Genome Project was perhaps an ideal model of a successful highprofile project. Much as envisioned by the National Research Council report Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome,1 it led to a flourishing of technical advances in our ability to analyze DNA and a much closer connection between research on model experimental organisms and human biology.
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The War on Cancer encouraged development of experimental techniques for isolating and growing retroviruses and expanded knowledge about their life cycles, which proved invaluable in confronting the AIDS epidemic. Nonetheless, the committee does not believe that the possibility of collateral or unexpected, unplanned, perhaps serendipitous contributions from a high-profile project would be an effective way to bring quantitative methods into the biological sciences and quantitative descriptions into our understanding of biology.
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Hence, an all-out effort to "understand" the bacterium Escherichia coli or the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, if undertaken, should have biological goals. Perhaps a predictive computer model is part of what is needed, but it should not be the central goal.
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Certainly there was technical risk that the Human Genome Project would prove premature, and there was even some risk that genome sequences would prove so difficult to interpret that their impact on biology would be minimal. Nonetheless, by the late 1980s, it was abundantly clear that DNA sequencing was capable of providing much useful information about biology, that there were open-ended opportunities to lower its cost and increase its throughput, and that genome sequences would play a very important role in the future of biological research.
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Calculus, the mathematical properties of continuous, very small elements, has been the essential language for describing the physical world and the language employed in the physical sciences, but biology has discrete elements, and the quantitative language of the computational and information sciences appears far more suited to be the language of biology. As a consequence of these many ways in which biology differs from the physical sciences, the committee looks forward to its many influences on mathematics, including some explicitly new mathematics.
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The committee believes that the 21st century's intensifying quest to understand the living world will provide an equally rich stimulus for future triumphs.
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