NRC Report, "A New Biology for the 21st Century," Looks Good; Focus on Food, Environment, Energy, and Health

By Richard O'Grady on September 18, 2009 1:46 PM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

AIBS attended the Sept. 17th release of the widely-anticipated NRC report, "A New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution," requested by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and U.S. Department of Energy. Its findings were presented by three members of its writing committee:

Phillip A. Sharp, Institute Professor, Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Anthony C. Janetos, Director, Joint Global Change Research Institute, University of Maryland, College Park
Keith R. Yamamoto, Executive Vice Dean, School of Medicine, University of California - San Francisco

The press release, PPTs, full report, and other information are online at http://national-academies.org/morenews/20090917.html.

The report calls for a "new multiagency, multiyear, and multidisciplinary initiative to capitalize on the extraordinary advances recently made in biology and to accelerate new breakthroughs that could solve some of society's most pressing problems -- particularly in the areas of food, environment, energy, and health."

The report is not an attempt to redefine what all of biology is or should be. We see it as a scientifically sound and strategically-savvy plan identifying four interconnected areas of biology -- (1) food supply and safety, (2) clean renewable energy from biological sources, (3) human health and disease prevention, and (4) ecosystem services -- that in synergy have the potential to attract public support and funding with practical results and education goals that improve the human condition.

Handled smartly by the scientific community to which it has now been delivered, "A New Biology for the 21st Century," has the potential to become the "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" for biology. Contact AIBS's Public Policy Director, Robert Gropp, at rgropp@aibs.org, if you can help.


NRC Releasing Report, "A New Biology for the 21st Century," on 17 Sept. 2009 at Public Session

By Richard O'Grady on September 9, 2009 11:04 AM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

AIBS has been following the NRC work on this report over the last year or so. We have received the invitation below to attend the public release of the final report on 17 Sept 2009; we plan to have representatives there. Others are invited to attend too -- just reply to acline@nas.edu (details below).

Text of Invitation:

Last December, you registered for the 2008 National Academies Biology Summit: The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future. The Summit was held as part of a National Research Council study entitled: A New Biology for the 21st Century. I would like to invite you to attend the public briefing to mark the release of the study report.

Event: Public Briefing on NRC report: A New Biology for the 21st Century

Where: Members' Room, National Academy of Sciences Building, 2101 Constitution Avenue, Washington DC

When: 10am, Thursday, September 17th, 2009

RSVP to: acline@nas.edu

On Thursday, September 17th, Phillip Sharp (Institute Professor, MIT) and Keith Yamamoto (Executive Vice Dean, University of California, San Francisco) will give a public briefing on the report, A New Biology for the 21st Century, on the occasion of its public release. The report was written at the request of NIH, NSF and the DOE and authored by a committee co-chaired by Dr. Sharp and Dr. Thomas Connelly, executive vice president and chief innovation officer of DuPont Company.

Biological research is in the midst of revolutionary change. Technological and conceptual advances have allowed biologists to collect and make sense of ever more detailed observations at ever smaller time intervals, and the Human Genome Project has had enormous payoffs that were largely unanticipated when the project began. Advances in the life sciences hold tremendous promise for surmounting many of the major challenges confronting the United States and the world. Historically, major challenges have inspired science to focus attention on critical needs. Scientific efforts based on meeting societal needs have laid the foundation for countless new products, industries, even entire economic sectors that were unimagined when the work began.

A forthcoming NRC report, A New Biology for the 21st Century concludes that the life sciences have reached a point where a new level of inquiry is possible. The report names this new level of inquiry the New Biology and explains why it has the potential to take on more ambitious challenges than ever before. As examples of the kinds of challenges this approach can address, the committee has chosen aspects of critical economic sectors--food, the environment, energy, and health--to which the New Biology could make important contributions. These are challenges that cannot be addressed by any one subdiscipline or agency--opportunities that require integration across biology and with other sciences and engineering, and that are difficult to capitalize on within traditional institutional and funding structures. Each challenge will require technological and conceptual advances that are not now at hand, across a disciplinary spectrum that is not now encompassed by the field. Achieving these goals will demand, in each case, transformative advances, but achieving understanding at this systemic level is the promise of the New Biology.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Ann Reid
Study Director
Senior Program Officer
Board on Life Sciences
202-334-1263
areid@nas.edu

Nice to See!: AAMC / HHMI Report Recommends Pre-Med Students Learn about Evolution

By Richard O'Grady on August 27, 2009 3:19 PM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The June 2009 report (free online), "Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians," from the Association of American Medical Colleges in association with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which proposes scientific competencies for future medical school graduates and for undergraduate students who want to pursue a career in medicine, includes Competency E8: "Demonstrate an understanding of how the organizing principle of evolution by natural selection explains the diversity of life on earth".

Note also the following two paragraphs in the section titled: Issues of Concern and Goals:

"This report stems largely from the concern that premedical course requirements have been static for decades and may not accurately reflect the essential competencies every entering medical student must have mastered, today and in the future. The competencies for premedical education need to be broad and compatible with a strong liberal arts education. The work of the committee is based on the premise that the undergraduate years are not and should not be aimed only at students preparing for professional school. Instead, the undergraduate years should be devoted to creative engagement in the elements of a broad, intellectually expansive liberal arts education. Therefore, the time commitment for achieving required scientific competencies should not be so burdensome that the medical school candidate would be limited to the study of science, with little time available to pursue other academically challenging scholarly avenues that are also the foundation of intellectual growth.

"One goal of this project is to provide greater flexibility in the premedical curriculum that would permit undergraduate institutions to develop more interdisciplinary and integrative science courses, as recommended in the [2003] BIO 2010 report. By focusing on scientific competencies rather than courses, undergraduate institutions will have more freedom to develop novel courses to achieve the desired competencies without increasing the total number of instructional hours in the sciences in the face of continuing increases in medically relevant scientific knowledge. Achieving economies of time spent on science instruction would be facilitated by breaking down barriers among departments and fostering interdisciplinary approaches to science education. Indeed, the need for increased scientific rigor and its relevance to human biology is most likely to be met by more interdisciplinary courses."

NBII Launches New Search Engine for Online Biological Data

By Richard O'Grady on August 19, 2009 3:37 PM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I just attended a stimulating meeting here in DC with staff from the USGS's National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program. Also present were representatives from AIBS-member-societies the Ecological Society of America (who hosted the event at their headquarters office), the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Natural Science Collections Alliance.

NBII was demonstrating its impressive new search engine for online biological data. Everyone at the meeting came away with lots of ideas for how the search engine could be used for searches that are both broad and deep and gave many suggestions for its further development to NBII, who plan to hold additional community-feedback meetings in the future.

NBII invites contacts from organizations with databases to link to (contact: mlane@usgs.gov) and describes the search engine's extensive Web 2.0 capabilities in the following press release:

"August 17, 2009. The week of August 10, the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) launched a new search engine. The new NBII search is designed to support the discovery of and provide access to critical national and global biological information and data. The new NBII search engine is based on the Vivisimo Velocity search platform and features dynamic clustering, faceted searching, extensive source control, integration with the NBII LIFE image library, and the ability to simultaneously search critical global and national biodiversity resources such as the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF), Amphibiaweb, and the Missouri Botanical's TROPICOS database. The new NBII search supports flexible information acquisition through web site/database crawling and real time federated resource searching. Finally, the new NBII search supports the custom development of multiple information indexes, geospatial integration with Google Maps, visualization, and flexible control over search result displays. The new NBII search is available on the NBII Portal at http://www.nbii.gov/."

You Really Should Join the Facebook Group for Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education and Mobilizing the Community for Change

By Richard O'Grady on July 24, 2009 10:10 AM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

By all accounts, including those of AIBS Education Programs Manager Susan Musante, the big NSF-funded meeting earlier this month in DC on Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education and Mobilizing the Community for Change was highly successful and is already generating a number of exciting follow-up activities.

The Co-Chairs are:

Carol A. Brewer - Associate Dean of the Colleges Arts and Science and Professor of Biology, University of Montana (and AIBS Board member)

Alan I. Leshner - Chief Executive Officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Executive Publisher, Science

The project's website at www.visionandchange.org includes a growing number of resources, videos, and slides from the meeting's presentations and discussion groups.

The project's Facebook Group, run by Carol Brewer and Yolanda George, Deputy Director, AAAS Education and Human Resources Programs, already has about 100 members and welcomes anyone who is interested in improving undergraduate biology education to become a member of its virtual community and help develop an action plan for moving forward.

To quote from the Group's description:

Both the disciplines of biology and of science education have undergone a revolution. The major focus of the biological sciences - understanding life - remains unchanged, but breakthrough discoveries of the second half of the 20th century have changed the basic nature of the questions asked, while new and emerging technologies are changing the ways key questions are addressed. In undergraduate science education, new approaches and new technologies are also emerging based on evolving theories of learning. New developments in higher education have changed the manner in which people pursue higher education, and there is also a growing appreciation of the need to broaden participation within the sciences by advancing the education of all students, including those from underrepresented groups and those who will enter careers outside of science.

Given the radical changes in the nature of the science of biology and what we have learned about effective ways to teach, this is an opportune time to address the biology we teach so that it better represents the biology we do. The goal of this Facebook group is to provide a virtual forum for interested educators to focus on undergraduate biology education by engaging them in shared, directed, provocative, and ongoing discussions that lead to action in the immediate future.

We will use this site to follow-up on the July 2009 Conference hosted by AAAS. We hope members will post ideas, links to teaching tools and approaches, and alerts for future meetings. Together, we will develop a blueprint for change in biology education and, critically, an action plan.

[Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-0923874]

AIBS DC Office Sub-Lease Available

By Richard O'Grady on July 7, 2009 11:40 AM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

AIBS's downtown Washington DC office at 14th and I Streets NW has up to about 2,500 sq ft available for sub-lease. The space has a separate entrance and is currently configured for eight private offices and a common area. Access to AIBS's conference room and kitchen elsewhere on the same floor is a negotiable addendum to the terms. The sub-lease would run to 2016, when AIBS's lease comes up for renewal.

We're one block from American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Headquarters; half-a-block from a Metro/subway station (McPherson Square, Blue/Orange); surrounded by service shops, food outlets, and hotels; minutes from Capitol Hill; automobile parking across the street in a commercial garage; and Metro access with no train changes to National Science Foundation Headquarters in VA as well as to National Airport.

See the flyer at 1444 Eye Street, NW - flyer.pdf

Twitter -- me? You bet. U should 2.

By Richard O'Grady on June 26, 2009 10:24 AM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

(Update: AIBS staff member Oksana Hlodan blogged on the topic of "Twitter for Educators" on 9 Feb 2009 in her ActionBioscience.org Editor's Blog.)

Readers will see the new Twitter feed on this blog page and are invited to follow my postings about AIBS activities at https://twitter.com/AIBSbiology as well as here on this blog. Twitter is one more way to get news and views out to the biology community -- plus one can create 140-character messages much more readily than three or four more detailed paragraphs for a blog posting, so the two activities complement each other nicely.

An increasing number of scientific organizations are adding Twitter to their electronic tools for sharing and exchanging information -- for example, the Society of Systematic Biologists at https://twitter.com/systbiol and the NSF Biology Directorate at https://twitter.com/NSF_BIO. Professors are starting to use Twitter to extend discussions with students in and out of class, and there's this fascinating article in the 5 June 2009 issue of Time about the use of Twitter at scholarly meetings; the authors of that article write:

The Open Conversation

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter.

Continue reading Twitter -- me? You bet. U should 2..

Did I Hear that AIBS is Changing its Annual Meeting Format?

By Richard O'Grady on June 9, 2009 1:32 PM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Yes, you did. At its Spring meeting on 17 May 2009, the AIBS Board of Directors passed the following resolution:

In view of the changing times, the Board directs that the Annual Meeting be discontinued in its current format and transformed to meet the needs of the membership and utilize evolving communication technologies.


So the meeting format of two-days in the Spring in Washington DC that we've followed for the last ten years, which was itself a change from the previous format of larger multi-society meetings that we'd followed for almost 50 years, will be revised starting in 2010, when we'll launch an annual program of strategically timed, topic-specific, half-day events -- typically with three or four speakers -- in person and online via webinar in DC and elsewhere over the course of the year. The AIBS membership will be polled for comments on the new meeting format, and details will be announced later in 2009.

These new meetings will aim to capitalize on AIBS's unique status as a meta-level organization created to give biologists a collaborative voice and influence on the national scene. The meetings will coordinate with and build upon AIBS programs in public policy, research, education, publication in BioScience or ActionBioscience.org, and other areas of AIBS Board, staff, and member activity. They will provide networking opportunities for members with fellow scientists and decision-makers from other fields that small gatherings can do more effectively. And in each case, as much of their content as possible will be online, both as archived recordings and as real-time interactive webinars.

2010 AIBS President Joe Travis has expressed the new meeting concept nicely with the following note to his fellow AIBS Board members:

"A key component of success for [this annual program] of 1/2 day meetings is timeliness of topic. Sometimes timeliness of topic is determined by events -- a push for integrated environmental/climate research by the new administration might make a meeting on good examples of that kind of research or a meeting focused on emerging challenges of integrated research very timely.

"Sometimes timeliness might be determined by events unfolding "within science" -- a meeting focused on an emerging horizon of biology with clear implications for policy or education. We could even, say, join with the National Association of Biology Teachers for a conference about learning in science and what real research on learning is revealing, which was a theme of Bruce Alberts' recent talk at the 2009 AIBS annual meeting, "Why Redefining Science Education is the Key to Enhancing the Public Understanding of Science". This would argue that some meetings can be planned long in advance but perhaps others would be convened reasonably quickly in response to external or internal events."

AIBS Annual Meetings: Themes and Audiences, Onsite and Online

By Jeffrey Newman on April 10, 2009 12:32 PM  Permalink | No Comments | No TrackBacks

At AIBS we're always having to keep in mind that we are no one's primary-affiliation society. People don't join AIBS in order to conduct their research or other primary professional activities in their disciplinary specialties--that's the role served by our member societies and organizations. Rather, we're an umbrella organization offering meta-level services and coalition activities--that's what it says right in the preamble to the AIBS Constitution:

"The purposes of the Institute shall be the advancement of the biological sciences and their applications to human welfare, and to foster and encourage research and education in the biological sciences, including the medical, environmental, and agricultural sciences. To serve these purposes, the Institute will assist societies, other organizations, and biologists in such matters of common concern as can be dealt with more effectively by united action; hold and sponsor scientific meetings; cooperate with local, national, and international organizations concerned with the biological sciences; provide a voice for biologists in the public forum; promote unity and effectiveness of effort among all those who are devoting themselves to the biological sciences and their applications; and foster the relations of the biological sciences to other sciences, to the arts and industries, and to the public good."


Organizing annual meetings at AIBS carries special challenges because no one needs to attend an AIBS meeting in the same sense that they need to attend the meeting of their primary society(ies). In the latter case, individuals attend in order to network with their peers in their area of specialization, present research results, look for jobs, look for folks to hire, etc. But in the case of AIBS meetings, the same kind of draw is not there, or at least has not been there since 1998, which marked the 48th and final consecutive year that AIBS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the annual meetings of a number of its member societies. Those were big meetings with thousands of attendees.

However, by 1999, the member societies with whom we had been meeting had been become sufficiently robust (and the meeting-organizing business had sufficiently changed) that they could head off on their own and hold their own annual meetings. After a year of contemplation (during which the first-ever Presidents' Summit was held), AIBS began holding much smaller, thematically focused annual meetings, in Washington DC, during the March - May time period. The 2000 meeting was on the theme, not surprisingly, of Challenges for the New Millennium. Subsequent annual meeting themes have included: From Biodiversity to Biocomplexity (2001) * Evolution: Understanding Life on Earth (2002) * Bioethics in a Changing World (2003) * Invasive Species: A Search for Solutions (2004) * Biodiversity: The Interplay of Science, Valuation, and Policy (2006) * Evolutionary Biology and Human Health (2007) * Climate, Environment, and Infectious Diseases (2008) * and this year's meeting on May 18 - 19, "Sustainable Agriculture: Greening the Global Food Supply", which for the first time includes a live webcast component.

Continue reading AIBS Annual Meetings: Themes and Audiences, Onsite and Online.
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