The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future Summary of a Workshop (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Important the life sciences can help produce segments of the life sciences are merging with the physical sciences and engineering enough food for a growing to create "transdisciplinary" scientific endeavors focused on pressing global population, cure chronic and acute problems. This blending of disciplines is diseases, meet future needs for leading to new insights into life processes and creating new opportunities to translate energy, and manage the preservation those insights into practical applications, just as the synthesis of the physical and of earth's biological heritage for mathematical sciences with engineering in the 20th century created the electronics and future generations.
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Similar advances have produced benefits throughout medicine, observed Thomas Cech, President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Harold Varmus, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Greater understanding of the role of tumor necrosis factor in inflammatory disease has led to antibody treatments that have changed the lives of many people with rheumatoid arthritis.
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Investigations of bacterial genetics could provide new treatments for infectious diseases, including diseases caused by microbes that have evolved mechanisms to evade existing treatments. Bioengineered stem cells could provide regulated insulin secretion in people with diabetes, for example, or repair severed spinal cord nerves.
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Microbes are already producing biofuels and could, through further research, provide a major component of future energy supplies. Marine and terrestrial organisms extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which suggests that biological systems could be used to help manage climate change.
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"That says a lot when you consider that humans have been trying to do this for 8,000 years." Many other technologies derived from basic scientific research are boosting agricultural yields. Automated gene sequencers test genetic markers in thousands of individual seeds per day.
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aren't going to do the fundamental research in photosynthesis and plant development and plant hormones that is going to lay the groundwork for a future understanding of how plants work," said Cech. For the life sciences to have a dramatic effect on nutrition, the world's food supply, and the renewable energy problem, "we need to keep reinvesting in understanding the biology." Answering Fundamental Questions The life sciences can answer some of the most fundamental, interesting, and difficult questions that human beings can ask.
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In the past decade, new tools have become available to explore the microbial processes that drive the chemistry of the oceans, observed David Kingsbury, Chief Program Officer for Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. These technologies have revealed that a large proportion of the planet's genetic diversity resides in the oceans.
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The effort to understand organisms led to the study of biological processes on progressively smaller scales. As former NIH Director Elias Zerhouni put it, "Just as physicists went from gross phenomena to atomic structure to subatomic particles, we have gone from understanding organs and their general functions to trying to understand molecular events." This research led to the discovery that all organisms rely on essentially the same basic molecular mechanisms, so investigations of one organism can yield insights that apply throughout biology.
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It was a triumph of knowledge for knowledge's sake. This new understanding of the physical world also yielded what Hockfield called a "parts list" for the physical world – a basic understanding of the constituents and interactions of physical objects.
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This work represents a step beyond interdisciplinary research, in which researchers from different disciplines contribute elements to a common problem, or multidisciplinary research, where disciplines overlap. The convergence of the life sciences, the physical sciences, and engineering has the potential to produce a transdisciplinary science in which separate disciplines merge into something new.
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Also, program officers could be given some authority to override study sections to support innovative projects with the potential for important advances, allowing researchers to spend their time doing science instead of writing grant applications. Finally, it is important for federal agencies to have "flexible funding mechanisms to support unconventional self-assemblies of scientists with ideas beyond the typical framework of grants." Zerhouni – along with several other speakers - further asserted that federal agencies need to find ways of supporting younger scientists.
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to grab the attention of kids from K to 12 to say, ‘wow, this is cool stuff, I want to be doing science and engineering and math.'" Education in STEM subjects needs to reflect the changing nature of science. The disciplinary structure of university departments organizes knowledge in a coherent way for teaching and research.
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While the potential for significant advances is enormous, many challenges need to be to overcome. Achieving the promise of the life sciences articulated by the Summit speakers will require investment, creative approaches to how life sciences research is organized and funded, and attention to improving science education at all levels.
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