John C. Wingfield: Preparing for the Best and the Worst of Times

Interview John C. Wingfield: Preparing for the Best and the Worst of Times Beardsley: As a former president of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, you obviously appreciate the value of research that integrates biological subdisciplines. Do you envision new interdisciplinary programs being launched from here at the intersections with the physical and social sciences, mathematics, and engineering? Wingfield: Yes, I certainly do. These are developing all the time and have been over the year while I’ve been here as division director. In the past year, we initiated BioMaPS, which is an interaction of BIO and the mathematical and physical sciences. That is to promote more mathematical and biophysical approaches to biology. There are lots of programs that will evolve over the years. We have ongoing interactions with the NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and with the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastucture in relation to CIF21, the Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering. I see these developing more and more. One thing I see being discussed among many of the assistant directors, and also within the directorates, is the need to tackle problems associated with data-intensive science and computation-intensive science. These are huge bottlenecks for many science and engineering endeavors, question? These are issues that all of the directorates are tackling head-on, and we are talking to one another. Beardsley: Will there be mandates on open access to data? articularly biology. There are all sorts p of programs that are ongoing, like iPlant [www.iplantcollaborative.org], which is doing a tremendous amount to solve some of these problems, or the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis. All of these are funded to varying extents by NSF, including BIO. So people are addressing these enormous problems of managing data. How does one manage data sets that contain a lot of images or animal behavior? Genomics data are a bit more straightforward; we’ve been doing that for a long time. But how do you put these out there in some sort of cloud that a PI [principal investigator] could access as well as draw on totally different data sets to ask a completely individual Wingfield: Yes. I can’t give you any details, because I don’t know them yet, and they are evolving, but somehow NSF is going to have them. As you know, we have now a two-page data management plan, which needs to go in with each proposal. That’s really a beginning. It’s going to evolve tremendously as we gain more experience and as principal investigators tell us how they’d like to see the data managed. Beardsley: More generally, what do you see as the three greatest priorities, or opportunities, for the biological sciences research community? Wingfield: I expand the three to the five grand challenges [Research at the Intersection of the Physical and Life Sciences, National Academies Press, 2010] that the National Academy of Sciences put forward. BIO is very actively engaged in all of those. I think perhaps the grand challenge is how to integrate all these. For example, one of the grand challenges is genomes to phenomes: How could one predict from a genome the phenotypes that could develop? And it goes beyond that, because then BioScience 62: 17–22. ISSN 0006-3568, electronic ISSN 1525-3244. © 2012 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site at www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintinfo.asp. doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.1.6 www.biosciencemag.org January 2012 / Vol. 62 No. 1 • BioScience 17 John C. Wingfield, an environmental endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, was appointed by National Science Foundation (NSF) director Subra Suresh as head of the foundation’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, known universally as BIO, last September. BioScience editor in chief Timothy M. Beardsley interviewed Wingfield in his office at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The interview has been edited for clarity. Interview Beardsley: I’ve started to hear the word bioeconomy more recently. Wingfield: Bioeconomy and jobs— how fundamental biology, which is what NSF funds, contributes to the economy. One example I could make is the recently reported research [by Karen and Louis Burnett of the College of Charleston] that involved a shrimp on a treadmill. Actually, that project turns out to be a way in which one can assess the health of shrimp populations, both in the field and in aquaculture. Given that the shrimp commercial world is a multibilliondollar industry employing thousands of people, these sorts of things can have—do have—an impact on the bioeconomy. There are many other examples in BIO. For example, the plant genome research program and BREAD (the Basic Research to Enable Agricultural Development program), which is a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These are projects that are using fundamental research at the molecular, genomics, and metabolomics levels to actually develop crops that will serve the world in the future. They involve very basic investigation of organism– environment interaction—in this case, environment–crop interaction. For example, we have projects that 18 BioScience • January 2012 / Vol. 62 No. 1 are trying to develop varieties of rice that are flood resistant. We’re used to thinking that rice likes to grow in water, but it is susceptible to floods. We’re also looking to develop other crops that are drought resistant; that tolerate salt; that are cold tolerant, heat tolerant… all of these are classic questions of organism–environment interaction that can only be answered at a very fundamental level. That is what BIO is doing more of. Also, I am hopeful we’ll be able to enable similar sorts of coordinated interactive research with genomics, bioinformatics, and organismal biology to do the same with animal research— and with microbes and fungi as well. There’s considerable progress on these fronts that I see as enabling organismal biologists, so that PIs and their students who’re working with nonmodel organisms—whether it be an arctic fox or some spider or crustacean or worm—can take their research into the postgenomics era. This is becoming more and more possible. Given that there are bioinformatics and datamanagement issues that need to be solved, we see the future as extremely exciting. We’ll be able to study so many interesting organisms that will answer so many of the fundamental questions of biology. I didn’t mention understanding the brain, and dimensions of biodiversity, which are all part of the same mix. We’re looking to a more unified biology, instead of molecular, cellular, organismal, then environmental. I see the boundaries between these getting very blurred, and I see the future is going to be the inter (...truncated)