A report released today calls on the United States to launch a new interagency, multidisciplinary life sciences scheme aimed at tackling society’s most pressing problems.
A national “new biology” initiative that brings together physical scientists, engineers and biologists of all stripes is essential to find solutions in the areas of food production, environmental protection, renewable energies and personalized medicine, the National Research Council’s Board on Life Sciences concluded. The report urges that new funding be set aside on a 10-year timescale to establish the interagency effort, with money earmarked for new information technologies and training initiatives as well as scientific research.
“Interagency leadership will be important in making this happen,” says Phillip Sharp, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the co-chairman of the Committee on a New Biology for the 21st Century. The committee has already had positive discussions with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises President Obama on how to develop and implement science and technology policies and budgets, about finding new money for the initiative, Sharp says.
“We really feel that this can be done with a relatively modest amount of money,” says Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California at San Francisco’s school of medicine and chairman of the Board on Life Sciences. Yamamoto declined to put a specific price tag on the initiative but says that funding for each of the four new biology programs should exceed the National Institutes of Health’s $480 million Common Fund, which currently supports interdisciplinary research. This would set the annual sticker price at more than two billion dollars. “You can add the numbers,” says Yamamoto.
The report — which was requested last summer by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy — is the first comprehensive review of the life sciences by the National Research Council in two decades.
Taking an integrative biological approach should help solve four broad challenges related to food, environment, energy and health — four fields that encompass 50% of the United States’ gross domestic product — the report authors claim. The initiative would strive for sustainable local food production through improved crop breeding and genetics, early warning markers of environmental damage to halt or reverse ecosystem destruction, green energy alternatives to fossil fuels, and individualized health surveillance and treatment strategies.
These problems cannot be solved in isolation, says Anthony Janetos, director of the University of Maryland at College Park’s Joint Global Change Research Institute and a member of the committee. Janetos notes that the same science — systems biology, genotype-phenotype mapping, biodiversity, etc. — underlie each problem, and the same technologies — high-throughput techniques, imaging tools, and information infrastructure — will lead to viable solutions.
“Life sciences are at a stage in their development with the ability to … produce descriptive and predictive information to address these big problems,” says Janetos.
Image: National Research Council