Laying the Groundwork for Biology in the 21st Century

CIBIO Overview Report

The Subcommittee on 21st Century Biology has been commissioned by the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences Advisory Committee to study the ways in which computing technology will facilitate and revolutionize the study of biology at the dawn of the new century.

The OptIPuter is one of many applications made possible by continuing advances in cyberinfrastructure.

Tomorrow's advances in biology will increasingly depend upon access to, and the use of, computer resources. Genome-enabled science, systems biology, high throughput biology, and biocomplexity in the environment are all among the many visible signs of the future. The extraordinary complexity of living systems makes information technology (IT) an ideal partner for the future. IT will become the language of biology in the way that calculus is the language of the physical sciences. However, the hierarchical nature of the biological sciences, combined with the myriad data types and the need for multiscale, multimodal data integration over vast scales of time and space, makes the application of computer science and engineering to the biological sciences a particularly difficult challenge. Indeed, biology in the 21st century will clearly be dependent upon a solid foundation of information technology.

Researchers at the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) involved in the collection of primary research data for their cyberinfrastructure project.

The goal for the National Science Foundation (NSF) is to bring the two fields together, consolidating and integrating the connections that now exist along the frontier, exploiting innovative opportunities at the interface, and providing the training and outreach necessary to engage the entire country's substantial academic and scholarly resources. The world of information technology, from computing to storage to communication, is moving toward the establishment of a cyberinfrastructure for all science domains; Dr. Rita Colwell, a previous NSF Director, described this goal to be an essential step toward defining science and engineering research and education for our society in this century.

As the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee works with the staff of the NSF and with other members of the scientific community to sharpen the vision for 21st century biology, we must explore the needs of the biological science community for cyberinfrastructure:

• What is the scientific and technological scope?
• What are the explicit educational opportunities and requirements?
• What should the NSF be doing?

The goal of this web site is to coordinate and consolidate the various efforts of the worldwide academic community to establish a cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences.

Last Updated January 16, 2008