# Dr. Rita R. Colwell

## Director

## National Science Foundation

## Plenary

## 

## "Biocomplexity, Holistic Science, 

## and Future Frontiers"

## 

## NSF 

## Biocomplexity in the Environment 

## Awardees Meeting

## Crystal City Marriott

## Arlington, VA

## 

**September 15, 2003**

**\[Slide: Blank screen\]**

**Thank you, Joann,**[^1] **for that generous introduction. I am
delighted to be here this afternoon and honored to address such an
accomplished group.**

**As current and former Awardees of NSF's Biocomplexity in The
Environment initiative, you are in the vanguard of an exciting new era
of research. Together we have crossed a threshold in the way we work as
scientists -- in our tools, in our thinking, in our collaborations. We
have moved beyond the descriptive and the quantitative -- into an
unprecedented arena of simulation, visualization, and prediction.**

**My assignment this afternoon is to discuss how future research in
*all* disciplines, including our work in biocomplexity, will unfold
within the new paradigm of holistic science.**

**\[Slide: Title slide\]**

**I have titled my remarks "Biocomplexity, Holistic Science, and Future
Frontiers." That's a departure from the title printed in your program,
but I *will* touch on interdisciplinary collaboration, one of several
trends that are helping us realize the potential of visualization and
simulation science.**

**Before I continue, I want to relate my findings from a quick search of
the expression "holistic science" on Google. Among the most prominent
hits were sites about wellness and healing, utopian proscriptions and
laws of wisdom, hypnotherapy and parapsychology, and even out-of-body
travel. I want to assure you that these are *not* the "further
frontiers" I plan to explore!**

**I am interested in the evolving context that is changing the conduct
of science in this new century.**

**\[Slide: Daguerreotype portrait\]**

None of us were around to witness the leap between the daguerreotype[^2]
and motion photography. Most of us are too young to remember the
"digital divide" between the decline of silent movies and the advent of
talking films. Possibly some of us were there to watch when black and
white TV was transformed into "living color."

**The difference between early photography and today's motion pictures
\-- with their extraordinary special effects \-- is a perfect analogy
for the difference between how we once illustrated science and
engineering and how we now visualize and simulate phenomena.**

**\[Slide: Old medical drawing of the body\]**

Once, bioscience relied on exacting botanical and anatomical
illustration. We were restricted to two-dimensional representation. Our
minds supplied the third dimension and those beyond. Today, given the
power of emerging collaborative insights, extraordinary tools, and
global access to information -- we are gaining the capability to
represent our universe from the nanoscale to the astronomical in a
specificity of detail that is breathtaking.

\[Slide: Teragrid\]

Another analogy for the unprecedented representations now available to
us involves the process of calculation: Mathematicians in the past had
grid paper to plot the implications of their theoretical equations -- we
have the *teragrid.* It is nearly the difference between painting by
numbers and advanced computer animation.

**As a young graduate student studying genetics at Purdue and
oceanography at the University of Washington, I could not have imagined
how advances in scientific knowledge and new tools would impact my own
research.**

**You have to remember that time and context: When I started, there was
no field called microbial ecology. Back then, it was called
bacteriology. For my Masters in genetics, I worked on crossing-over in
the linkage map of *Drosophila melanogaster,* the fruit fly. Part of my
job was to count 186,000 fruit flies!**

**Today, the entire genome of *Drosophila* is sequenced. And the
complete genomes of over 1,000 viruses and more than 100 microbes can
now be viewed on the Internet.**

**Old ways lead on to new ways. No matter what field they chose to
explore, the scientists of my generation have all shared my own
experience. An ongoing revolution of technical innovations has
dramatically enhanced our capacity to observe the world, to investigate
deeper questions, and to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.**

**Bioscience has evolved to become the locus of convergence for many
disciplines, drawing together information technology, mathematics, the
physical sciences, and the social sciences. Bioscience has been further
expanding -- to include the dynamics of biocomplexity, and its capacity
for global understanding.**

**\[Slide: Cholera collage\]**

**For more than 20 years, my research has been focused on infectious
disease and the biocomplex systems that advance its spread. I found the
ocean itself to be a reservoir for *V. cholerae* and I explored the
links between climate and the spread of cholera. During this time I have
seen genomics and the evolving tools of computational analysis
revolutionize marine biology.**

**Like any advance on the frontiers of biocomplexity, my cholera work
depends on understanding the dynamics of interrelated variables. Let me
give you just one example.**

**\[Satellite images of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh\]**

**When you use satellites to trace the seasonal fluctuations of the
temperature of seawater off Bangladesh, you find that the peaks -- the
warm water periods -- match the increase in cholera cases in hospitals
there. These cases can number up to 100,000 or more in a single year.**

**Without the concomitant advances in scientific discoveries and tools,
my work -- which required both the new molecular testing and satellite
imaging -- could not have occurred. Here, we see the active synergy of
advanced tools enabling new science, and new science leading to the
development of more sophisticated tools.**

**I am pleased to say we are now developing a predictive model for
cholera to anticipate environmental conditions conducive to the
bacterium -- and ultimately to mitigate or even prevent the outbreaks.**

**My cholera research has drawn upon remote sensing, sociology,
medicine, oceanography, mathematics, satellite data, and physics. The
trend in science now -- toward a wide, cross-disciplinary, and
collaborative research approach -- has evolved from an exotic sideline
into mainstream practice. Many of today's graduate students begin their
research with minds already attuned to the possibilities of
multidisciplinary collaboration.**

My career, as I look at it now, is like the tack of a sailboat. Unless
you get a head-wind, or are on a beam reach (the sweetest point of
sail), your craft cannot travel a straight line. To achieve one's
destination requires the zigzag of a series of tacking maneuvers. So it
is with science. My research has tacked from microbes to genetics to the
oceans -- to arrive at the next destination -- a deeper understanding
and appreciation of biocomplexity.

\[Slide: John Muir quote\]

The naturalist and writer John Muir had a strong sense of the
interconnectedness of nature's systems. A century later, we have become
even more attuned to the world's complexities.

We are all familiar with the provocative equation that chaos theory
provided. Expressed in poetic terms, it asked: Does the flap of a
butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? That 30-year-old
question triggered creative turbulence in our scientific thinking -- and
led us to new realizations about the nature of complexity across *all*
fields of study.

\[Slide: Collage w/computer operator\]

Holistic science is in the ascendancy now. Seminal insights from one
discipline generate discoveries in otherwise "unrelated" fields.
Breakthroughs in particle physics and genetics, advances in
computational science, IT, and microsensors -- are creating global
momentum for new ideas and tools. The sum of these dynamic influences
has given us the means to begin charting a systemic and comprehensive
view of life, matter, and the environment at all scales of time and
place.

**Once we waited for things to happen -- to see what happened. Then we
constructed physical experiments to observe what happened. Now, in
addition, we can simulate experiments to visualize what happens -- and
quickly apply our new knowledge.**

**Latter-day surgeons and biologists were utterly dependent on cadavers,
fossils, and other specimens to slowly reveal their truths. Today,
high-risk surgery can be conducted in a virtual environment.**

**\[Slide: Telesurgery\]**

**In practice, high-speed fiber-optic connections make it possible for a
telesurgeon in the U.S. to operate on a woman in France -- with a mere
200-millisecond delay between the surgeon's movements in New York and
the return video from Strasbourg.**

**We no longer have to build true-to-scale models by exacting hand. With
supercomputers we can build models of exquisite sensitivity within a
visual environment \-- and manipulate them at will. Once, to test new
designs for boats and airplanes required research basins and wind
tunnels. Now, it can also happen on a computer screen.**

**Information technology enables us to see the world anew. Advanced
computing and a wealth of widely distributed sensors are yielding
massive datasets. Each complete genome added to the database requires
enormous capacity for storage, retrieval, analysis, and transmission. We
are almost on information overload...and some of us may be beyond
overload!**

**We will require further advances in raw processing power, and even
more, advances in mathematics and computational science. Without such
advances, we will not be able to translate and comprehend the huge
amounts of data we've collected into a more-complete picture of the
world.**

**We have entered an era where advanced computational systems help
researchers make complex problems more tractable -- but more than that,
they create unprecedented opportunities to make new kinds of science
possible.**

**IT is letting us visualize the world in stunning and novel ways.**

**\[Slide: Walrus\]**

**This image from Young Hyun of CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for
Internet Data Analysis, is a visualization of global Internet
"roundtrips." The tool, called "Walrus," is used for the interactive 3-D
visualization of large, directed graphs in three-dimensional space. It
is possible to display graphs with a million nodes or more. "Walrus" is
one of many tools being developed to handle large amounts of complex
data.**

**IT is helping us share and mine enormous data sets, in novel
combinations, in distributed research among teams of scientists who
would not have a common ground were it not for information technology.**

Ten years ago, scientists working at the NSF-funded Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center unveiled the first three-dimensional, animated
model of a beating heart. In effect, they crossed another digital divide
by supplying a motion picture where only the snapshot of an X-ray had
existed before.

More recently, scientists at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center,
Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical
Center have created a powerful new technology for viewing the brain at
work.

\[Slide: 3-D images of brain activation\]

Using high-speed networks to link an MRI scanner with a supercomputer,
they've made it possible to convert scan data almost instantaneously
into an animated 3-D image showing which parts of the brain "light up"
during mental activity. New research on cognition is expanding our
knowledge of memory and aging processes, and will eventually help us to
design better learning environments.

Other images produced by simulation and visual science today are
enabling us to traverse many new frontiers:

Thanks to views from our portfolio of telescopes and from high-particle
physics, we have density maps of the galaxies that have helped us begin
to understand the conditions in which stars, other planetary bodies, and
galaxies form.

**We have also learned to observe and chart the movement of tectonic
plates, winds, ocean temperatures and currents, dust storms -- the whole
picture of weather patterns on this planet. Scientists at the University
of Illinois have used simulations to demonstrate the dynamics of
tornadoes -- creating a model that provides a closer look at updrafts,
downdrafts, and strong horizontal shifts in wind speed.**

**We can plot the incidence of infectious disease and the rise and fall
in species population. Universal data such as this cannot be
comprehended in its entirety on a microscope slide, nor viewed through
any physical aperture of any resolution. Only mathematics and computer
visualization and simulation can provide the large moving pictures we
require.**

**John Marburger, the President's Science Advisor, has described
complexity itself as a frontier, and I agree with his observation. Of
all the frontiers we explore, the landscape of biocomplexity in the
environment strikes me as the most complex -- with its unanswered
questions about a diversity of life forms, its immense interlinked
systems, and the overarching importance of water.**

**\[Slide: Ocean collage\]**

**When I consider complexity, my thoughts turn naturally to the oceans.
Here we can study long-term physical, chemical, and biological changes
-- on and beneath the seafloor, in the water column, and in the
atmosphere. Like many parts of the environmental frontier, the oceans
are still largely unexplored. It is our good fortune to have those
challenges ahead of us -- and to contemplate opportunities for human
betterment.**

**\[Slide: Two brittlestars\]**

**Nature has a powerful tendency to provide unexpected benefits to us --
if only we can see the patterns. You may have heard the story of the
brittlestar, a marine invertebrate that produces calcite crystals for
skeletal support. Researchers from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs found
that thousands of these same crystals form a primitive eye that covers
much of the organism's body.**

**\[Slide: Array of brittlestar microlenses\]**

**As Bell's VP for physical research, Federico Capasso, put it, these
crystals "are nearly perfect optical microlenses, much better than any
we can manufacture today."**

**Just last month, Lucent researchers found that another sea creature, a
sponge called the Venus flower basket, produces biological fibers that
are quite similar to commercial optical fibers -- yet much more
resistant to cracking and breaking. By following this lead, scientists
may discover ways to manufacture crack-resistant fibers, and low-cost
means to make optical materials at low temperatures.**

**Bell's research teams working on the brittlestar and the Venus basket
sponge were international and interdisciplinary -- comprised of
materials scientists, physicians, chemists, and biologists. That sounds
like holistic science to me -- and collaboration at its best -- when we
can work together in an emerging field like biomimetics and explore the
potential benefits of Earth's overlooked resources.**

**Christopher Columbus needed a ship, a crew, and navigational skills to
reach the "New World." We're launching our explorations into
biocomplexity and other areas of research with new sensor technologies,
astounding computational capacities, and productive collaborations. We
have *almost* everything we need. You are wondering what I mean by that
statement.**

**\[Slide: Young oceanographers\]**

**Even with the bounty now enjoy -- of new technologies and powerful
collaboration -- we won't be able to explore the further frontiers of
science without developing the talent of our young people. We can only
reach those heights by teaching the excitement of holistic science --
and inspiring the next generation to commit to doing the hard work that
lies ahead.**

**With that, I will leave you to your breakout session reports -- and to
a full day tomorrow. Your contributions are extremely valuable to NSF
and the bioscience. We are looking forward to your input on the
Foundation's BE programs and processes for the future.**

**Thank you.**

#### RC_2003_NSF_Biocomplexity_in_the_Environment_Awardees_Plenary_Crystal_City_VA_09-15dj

[^1]: Joann P. Roskoski, Executive Officer, BIO/OAD. \[Other possible
    introducer: Dr. Margaret Leinen\]

[^2]: \[Da-GER-a-type\]