A New Biology for the 21st Century (2009) / Chapter Skim
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2 How the New Biology Can Address Societal Challenges
2 How the New Biology Can Address Societal Challenges
Pages 17-38
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From page 17... ...
. As illustrated in Figure 2.1, the New Biology relies on integrating knowledge from many disciplines to derive deeper understanding of biological systems.
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From page 18... ...
The committee believes that virtually every biologist who reads this report's description of the New Biologist will recognize him or herself. All biologists think across levels of biological complexity -- molecular biologists consider the impact of genetic regulatory pathways on the health of organisms, ecologists consider the impact of environmental change on the gene pool of an ecosystem, and neuroscientists link cell-to-cell communication with behavior.
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From page 19... ...
Four proteins serve as master regulators of these processes, Shapiro and her colleagues have found. Rising and falling quantities of these proteins in particular parts of the cell produce "an exquisite coordination of events in a three dimensional grid." Building these circuit diagrams has allowed researchers to identify nodes that control cellular functions and are attractive targets for drugs designed to alter the functioning of cells.
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From page 20... ...
Consider the newly hired assistant professor in the immunology department of a medical school who wants to collaborate with an ecologist who studies the impact of changing land use patterns on natural ecosystems and an engineer who models complex networks. Together they hope to develop a biosensor to detect emerging infectious diseases.
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From page 21... ...
A recent NRC report, Achievements of the National Plant Genome Initiative and New Horizons in Plant Biology (National Research Council, 2008) , provides a series of recommendations that could serve as the basis for planning a coordinated effort to understand plant growth, including a call to develop "reference genomes." The report details the benefits of such genomes and outlines the characteristics of desirable reference sequences.
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From page 22... ...
Such predictive models, combined with a comprehensive approach to cataloguing and appreciating plant biodiversity and the evolutionary relationships among plants, will allow scientific plant breeding of a new type, in which genetic changes can be targeted in a way that will predictably result in novel crops and crops adapted to their conditions of growth. The goal of predictability is a critical one; genuine understanding of plant growth will reduce uncertainty about any possible health or environmental consequences of genetic changes, changes in growth conditions, or in associated microbial or insect communities.
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From page 23... ...
Information technology, imaging, and high-throughput sequencing are a few of the technological advances that promise to drive rapid advances in understanding and managing biological diversity. Developing a comprehensive knowledge of plant diversity and greater understanding of evolutionary relationships is the functional equivalent of building a fully stocked parts warehouse with an
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From page 24... ...
has been of great importance in improving crop resistance to plant diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, and fungi, and in resistance to herbivores such as insects. Detailed understanding of how plants grow, a comprehensive catalogue of plant diversity and evolutionary relationships, and a systems approach to understanding how plants interact with the microbes and insects in their environments––each of these areas is ripe for major advances in fundamental understanding and none of them can be addressed by any one community of scientists.
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From page 25... ...
A New Biology Approach to the Environment Challenge: Understand and sustain ecosystem function and biodiversity in the face of rapid change Humans do not exist independently of the rest of the living world. From the most basic requirements of oxygen, clean water, and food, to raw materials like fuel, building material, fiber for clothing, and shelter that have allowed human societies to flourish around the globe, to intangible benefits that enrich the quality of life such as the shade of a tree on a hot day or the inspiration of an eagle in flight, humans are dependent on other organisms.
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From page 26... ...
Monitoring activities are already carried out by several agencies; the Environmental Protection Agency measures air and water quality, the National Science Foundation administers the National Ecological Observatory Network and Long Term Ecological Research Network programs, U.S. Geological Survey has the National Water Quality Assessment, the United States Forest Service carries out forest inventories, the Department of Energy and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration administer Ameriflux (which measures ecosystem level exchanges of CO2, water, energy, and momentum across the Americas)
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From page 27... ...
No single scientific community, federal agency, or foundation can develop and implement a comprehensive set of ecosystem indicators, capable of monitoring the ecosystem services on which the nation relies. The New Biology approach––coordinating the resources already available and supporting research that integrates biology with physical and earth sciences, engineering, and computation––can be applied to build on such existing resources as the 2000 NRC report and the Heinz Center's 2002 and 2008 reports to evaluate potential ecological indicators in light of current capabilities and develop an implementable system for monitoring ecosystem function.
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From page 28... ...
A growing subfield in ecology is restoration, which ultimately holds the key to recovery of ecosystem services in heavily degraded areas (e.g., recovery of watershed function) , and perhaps even to mitigation of climate change through designing ecosystems with even greater capacity for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Ecological restoration has a role to play in improving crop productivity, reducing energy needs and slowing the loss of biodiversity.
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From page 29... ...
program, which calls for the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into gasoline from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022. In 2007, the United States consumed 176 billion gallons of fuel for transportation, so 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel (assuming equivalent energy content per unit volume)
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From page 30... ...
Development of energy crops that are direct sources of fermentable sugars, such as sugarcane or sweet sorghum, or sources of cellulosic materials, such as switchgrass, miscanthus, or agricultural and forestry byproducts, is an important priority. The same fundamental knowledge, tools, and technologies developed in the New Biology approach to the food challenge would be directly applicable here: understanding plant growth; advancing genetically informed breeding, transgenics and genetic engineering; advancing biodiversity, systematics and evolutionary genomics; and understanding crops as ecosystems.
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From page 31... ...
. A New Biology Approach to the Health Challenge: Understanding Individual Health The New Biology approach to the environmental challenge aims to make it possible to monitor ecosystem function and restore that function when it is compromised.
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From page 32... ...
Each individual has a unique set of genes and a unique environmental history, yet the relationship of all of this variation to health is uncertain. Understanding the relationship of an individual's genetic makeup and environmental history to that individual's health risks, disease susceptibility, and response to treatment is a challenge well beyond current capabilities.
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From page 33... ...
. Because genetic sequences serve as the blueprints for all biological processes, genetic variation affects the functioning of all of the networks that underlie human health.
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From page 34... ...
Understanding Networks Between the starting point of an individual's gene sequences and the endpoint of that individual's health is a web of interacting networks of staggering complexity. Recent advances are enabling biomedical researchers to begin to study humans more comprehensively, as individuals whose health is determined by the interactions between these complex structural and metabolic networks.
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From page 35... ...
Many of the pieces are identified, and some circuits and interactions have been described, but true understanding is still well beyond reach. Combining fundamental knowledge with physical and computational analysis, modeling and engineering, in other words, the New Biology approach, is going to be the only way to bring understanding of these complex networks to a useful level of predictability.
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From page 36... ...
. Ultimately, high-throughput assessment of the metabolome could provide a remarkably precise picture of the overall activities within and on the human body and critical insights into the relationship of "composite genotype" to phenotype.
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From page 37... ...
Interconnected Problems, Interconnected Solutions The future holds truly imposing challenges for humankind: efficiently improving the sustainable productivity of diverse food crops, producing sustainable substitutes for fossil fuels, monitoring and restoring ecosystem services, and understanding and promoting human health. The New Biology described in this report, if properly nurtured and supported, has the potential to contribute to real progress in meeting these challenges and many tools and approaches will be shared for all four problem areas.
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From page 38... ...
38 A NEW BIOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY that students, and the American public, will be inspired to help, and will be drawn in to science and science education. The United States cannot afford to wait for others to create these life science-based solutions.
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