Download The Interdisciplinary Scientist of the 21st Century

The Interdisciplinary Scientist
of the 21st Century
Eric Jakobsson
Director, NIGMS Center for Bioinformatics
and Computational Biology
Chair, NIH Biomedical Information Science
and Technology Initiative Consortium
For the DIMACS Conference on Mathematics
and Biology in the High Schools
April 29, 2005
Major Problems in American
Education
• We are not training American biology
researchers with quantitative skills at
even close to a rate to sustain, let alone
advance, American biology.
• A large number of Americans are
fundamentally ignorant about biology,
both in practical and theoretical terms.
For example, about 50% of Americans
do not believe in evolution….
…In spite of the obvious evidence; i.e., “The relative position of our
features is manifestly the same; and the various emotions are displayed by
nearly similar, movements of the muscles and skin, chiefly above the
eyebrows and round the mouth.”----Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The interdisciplinary scientist of the
18th Century
From: Isaac Newton:
The Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy
RULE II
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as
far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man, and in a beast; the
descent of stones in Europe and in America; the
light of`our culinary fire and of the sun; the
reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets
Every Page of a modern Molecular
Biology Text is based on physics that
did not exist in the 19th Century
• 1901Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen—x-rays
• 1902Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Pieter Zeeman--electromagnetism
• 1903Antoine Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, Marie
Curie—radiation
• 1905Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard—cathode rays
• 1914Max Theodor Felix von Laue—discovery of
x-ray diffraction
• 1915Sir William Henry Bragg, Sir William Lawrence
Bragg---crystal structure by X-ray
• 1918Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck---energy
quanta
• 1921Albert Einstein---photoelectric effect and
Brownian motion
• 1925James Franck, Gustav Ludwig Herz—
interaction of electrons with atoms
• 1926Jean Baptiste Perrin---sedimentation
equilibration
• 1929Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de
Broglie---wave nature of electrons
• 1930Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman---Light
(Raman) scattering
• 1933 Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Adrien Maurice
Dirac---prediction of the positron
• 1936 Victor Franz Hess, Carl David Anderson--experimental discovery of the positron
• 1944 Isidor Isaac Rabi—discovered magnetic
resonance of nuclei
• 1952 Felix Bloch, Edward Mills Purcell---precision
measurement of magnetic resonance
• 1953 Frits Zernike---Invented the phase contrast
microscope
• 1956William Shockley, John Bardeen, Walter
Houser Brattain—discovery of the transistor effect.
• 1961 Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf L. Moessbauer—
the state of metals in biomolecules.
• 1964 Charles H. Townes, Nikolai G.
Basov, Alexander M. Prokhorov—atomic
physics underlying the invention of lasers.
• 1973Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, Brian D.
Josephson—tunneling phenomena in
semiconductors
TOP TEN ADVANCES IN BIOMEDICAL
COMPUTING IN THE LAST DECADE
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Sequence alignment tools.
Dissemination of bioinformatics tools on the Web
Computational model of HIV infection---1996
Establishment of computer networks for surveillance of
disease.
Identification of genes for disease susceptibility.
Tomography
Enabling Systems Biomedicine.
Modeling electrical behavior of neurons and other
electrically excitable tissue.
Telemedicine.
Computer-aided Prosthetic Design.
TOP TEN CHALLENGES IN BIOMEDICAL
COMPUTING FOR THE NEXT DECADE
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In silico screening of drug compounds.
Predicting function from structure of complex molecules at an
engineering level of precision.
Accurate, efficient, and comprehensive dynamical models of
spread of infectious disease.
Integration of the computational tools of systems biology into an
integrated computational environment for information-based
modeling of pathways, networks, cells, and tissues.
Computerization of the health care delivery system.
Prediction of protein structure to the point where all protein
sequences have associated accurate structures.
Complete annotation of the genomes of selected model
organisms.
Intelligent systems for mining biomedical literature
Tuning biomedical computing software to hardware.
Utilizing computational biology tools in education
What kind of scientists and citizens do we need to
educate to meet those challenges?
• The beginning
• Thanks for your attention and your
commitment to building a good future.