Grand Opportunities: Strategies for Addressing Grand Challenges in Organismal Animal Biology

Integrative and Comparative Biology, volume 51, number 1, pp. 7–13 doi:10.1093/icb/icr052 GRAND CHALLENGES Jonathon H. Stillman,1,*,† Mark Denny,‡ Dianna K. Padilla,§ Marvalee H. Wake,† Sheila Patekô and Brian Tsukimurajj *Romberg Tiburon Center and Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, 3150 Paradise Drive, Tiburon, CA 94920, USA; †Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Valley Life Sciences Bldg Berkeley, CA 94720-3140, USA; ‡Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, 120 Oceanview Boulevard, Pacific Grove, CA 93950, USA; §Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245, USA; ôDepartment of Biology, 221 Morrill Science Center, 611 North Pleasant Street, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA; jjDepartment of Biology, California State University, Fresno, 2555 E. San Ramon Avenue, MS#SB73, Fresno, CA 93740, USA 1 E-mail: Introduction The Biology Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has requested that organismal biologists develop a vision and articulate the grand research challenges that will drive the future of organismal biology and the large-scale community-wide efforts that would be needed to address those challenges. Over the past decade, organismal animal biologists have been slow to develop community-wide initiatives relative to other bioscience communities (e.g., molecular biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and plant biologists). In response to NSF’s request, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) organized an effort to begin to articulate grand visions of the research questions that will form the foundation of future research in organismal animal biology (hereafter referred to as ‘‘organismal biology’’ for brevity). White papers, now known as contributions in the ‘‘Grand Challenges in Organismal Biology’’ (GCOB) series, have been published in Integrative and Comparative Biology over the past 2 years (Denny and Helmuth 2009; Denver et al. 2009; Satterlie et al. 2009; Schwenk et al. 2009; Mykles et al. 2010; Sih et al. 2010). These papers define a number of large-scale forward-thinking research efforts that cross the broad array of disciplines encapsulated by SICB and move organismal biology in new directions: (1) genotype– phenotype relationships, (2) integrating living and physical systems, (3) utilizing functional diversity, (4) organism-environment linkages, (5) evolutionary stability versus change, (6) how nonmodel organisms work, (7) garnering public support for organismal biology, (8) transforming organismal biology into 21st century science, (9) fostering inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research to yield emergent principles about organisms, (10) community research efforts in addressing GCOB, and (11) the predictive power of organismal biology in the context of ecological and evolutionary change. Implementing GCOBs At the 2010 SICB annual meeting a workshop was held to initiate a dialogue across organismal Advanced Access publication June 9, 2011 ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: . Grand Opportunities: Strategies for Addressing Grand Challenges in Organismal Animal Biology 8 the year. Outcomes from the 2010 workshop that stood out as important elements that will allow us to address the grand challenges were increased awareness of the grand challenges and identified foci, integration and education. At the 2011 SICB meeting, a second GCOB workshop was organized with the primary objective of engaging SICB members in productive breakout discussions to focus our effort to develop a plan or plans for implementation of grand challenges, and to move this process forward at a more rapid pace. SICB is not the only society with members that are organismal biologists, but SICB as a whole possesses the breadth of research approaches required to address many of the GCOBs. However, the complexity of GCOB questions requires novel collaborations and attitudes about organismal biology’s contributions to science and society. SICB is well-poised to play a leadership role among organismal biologists in addressing GCOBs because of the broad expertise in our society and commitment reflected by our membership. Organismal biologists, such as those in SICB, have the opportunity to shape their own destiny with respect to NSF’s long-term plans for funding in organismal biology. To develop our future, we must join in a broadly accepted vision of our research arenas at least 5–10 years into the future. We must do more than define GCOB questions: we must organize a vision for how to marshal the expertise, financial support, research facilities, and communication channels needed to address the GCOB questions in ways that will be productive and that will continue to keep our efforts in organismal biology fresh and forward-thinking. At the 2011 GCOB workshop, participants were challenged to become involved in thinking hard about the future of organismal biology and developing a community-based approach to meet the grand challenges. Grand-challenge strategies in other scientific communities The 2011 SICB GCOB workshop opened with a review of how previous efforts had unfolded. Other scientific communities have moved forward in addressing their own grand-challenge research objectives. In many cases, major research programs have resulted from coordinated efforts that involve building community interest, articulating that interest in a series of workshops and white papers, and consolidation of focus by the community to address specific scientific goals and identify (and obtain) required resources to reach those goals. For example, the systematics community initiated the ‘‘A Tree of Life (AToL)’’ program with the initial goal to identify evolutionary relationships among as many organisms as possible, especially at higher levels of organization, and in doing so address fundamental and important problems in ecology, agriculture, human health and society, and development of bioinformatic resources. The current focus among systematic biologists is a mission to assess and map as much of the Earth’s biodiversity as possible, thereby informing conservation efforts to preserve that biodiversity. The molecular biology community involved in plant sciences worked together beginning in the 1990s to launch an initiative to sequence the genomes of Arabidopsis (the primary model species for plant biology) and all of the major crop plants. While not every plant biologist biology that focused on how to address the GCOBs articulated by SICB (Tsukimura et al. 2010). A number of presentations were made by Executive Committee members of SICB and other professional societies to stimulate discussion. Major requirements for implementation, including bridging research fields and new interdisciplinary ap (...truncated)