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,