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Cornell and Stanford to work with Israel and Jordan on Bridging the Rift research center to include world's first databank for all living systems
ITHACA, N.Y. -- On March 9, Cornell University
will participate in a groundbreaking ceremony 50 miles south of the Dead Sea, on
the border between Israel and Jordan. Land donated by each country will be
joined to form a 150-acre site for a research facility, the Bridging the Rift (BTR)
Center, which will include the world's first databank of information about all
living systems.
The databank will be the core of the facility's centerpiece, the Library of
Life, led by Cornell and Stanford University scientists who will gather,
organize and model information to quantify and characterize all living systems.
The library will be a research and education center operating a databank, yet to
be developed, that will assemble information on living systems, from microbes to
plants to animals, using digital images and global positioning data. Information
also will flow from ecological and environmental investigations, molecular
research and DNA sequencing.
The research center will develop computer modeling systems to make predictions
at genetic levels and to help understand coevolution of species and the ways in
which ecology affects DNA, and the reverse. Both Cornell and Stanford will offer
doctoral degrees at the BTR Center.
Cornell President Jeffrey S. Lehman, who will attend the ceremony at the border
site (it is known as central Arava on the Israeli side and Wadi Araba on the
Jordanian side), says, "This project is an enormous undertaking, one that will
require the collaboration of scientists from every corner of the world. We are
grateful that the governments of Israel and Jordan have taken the first steps to
show how this collaboration can evolve. This is a unique scientific environment,
the perfect place to begin the project."
Because the new databank will gather a hugely diverse amount of information
about living systems, it will be a major advancement over GenBank, the database
operated by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. GenBank,
which stores genetic sequences, is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence
Database Collaboration, which also includes the DNA DataBank of Japan and the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
The Library of Life was proposed by Steven Tanksley, the Liberty Hyde Bailey
professor of plant breeding at Cornell, who will be a key adviser on the
project. The library's director will be Ron Elber, professor of computer science
at Cornell. The early work of the library will be to develop a prototype, the
Library of the Desert, which will be a digital catalog that includes living
samples of microbes, fungi, plants, insects, invertebrates and vertebrates in
the Dead Sea region. New computer languages and databases will be created to
integrate the massive amounts of data flowing into the library.
BTR Foundation, which is providing seed money for the BTR Center is headed by
New York City businessman Mati Kochavi, a native of Israel who is chairman of
Optic Solutions.
This is Cornell's second teaching and research initiative in the Middle East.
Last year, the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City opened a campus in
Qatar, the first higher education institution in that country to be
coeducational. Cornell is the first American university to offer its M.D. degree
overseas.
Background
Much of the research in the Library of Life, as at the BTR Center itself, will
involve the challenges presented by the completion of the Human Genome Project,
in which the basic fingerprints of humans, the DNA sequences, have been
recorded. In future decades researchers will attempt to unravel biological
functions and discover medical benefits. This, however, is only a small part of
the information that is necessary to understand life. Of the 20 million known
species on Earth, only a tiny fraction of genomes have been sequenced. And
genomes do not code ecological relationships and complex environmental effects,
which need to be recorded and modeled separately.
Cornell University is one of a handful of universities in the world making
investments in excess of $500 million to modernize life sciences research and
education programs. Through its New Life Sciences Initiative, Cornell is
engaging several hundred researchers across its campuses in Ithaca and at the
Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City in a broad program of education
and investigation, integrating life sciences with physical, engineering and
computational sciences.
Steven Tanksley, the Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding at Cornell
University, says that the collection of data at the Library of Life is expected
to take decades, by many research groups throughout the world. "Future advances
in medicine, agriculture and environmental sciences will critically depend on
the Library of Life," he says.
Tanksley says that collecting, cataloging and connecting data "will evolve into
the new basis for creativity and discoveries about the origins, mechanisms and
interconnectedness of life forms, and from that information we will embark on a
new future on how we feed and clothe ourselves.
This information will also expand and, in some ways, change how we view
ourselves, as the human species, in the larger context of life and the
universe."
The library's director, Ron Elber, professor of computer science at Cornell,
says that the aim of the library is to assemble a digital catalog and living
samples of all microbes, fungi, plants, insects, invertebrates and vertebrates
in the region, creating a Library of the Desert. It is because the desert
environment is not rich in life forms that comprehensive analysis of life
sciences for this specific environment might be feasible in a relatively short
time, he says. "This is important since the Library of Life will need to show
some tangible outcomes in a few years. Hence, besides the obvious economical and
ecological benefits to the region, the Library of the Desert will provide a
prototype for the Library of Life and will sketch the structure for libraries of
other regions richer in alternative life forms and more challenging to handle."
The complex nature of the data, he says, will require the development of new
software and new database systems. "We will need to handle new information at an
unprecedented scale as well as to integrate many existing databases. This is a
very major undertaking -- besides the obvious challenge of collecting the data."
Making the Library of Life's huge data set accessible over the Web also will
require a number of technical breakthroughs. A new language will be created
integrating classification schemes of different life science disciplines, making
it easy to navigate between the biology of the small and of the large. "The ties
between biology and the information sciences have always been deep; this project
will generate many hard questions for computing and information science, and
provide opportunities to apply our technology to meeting basic human needs,"
says Robert Constable, dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science
at Cornell. "We will be challenged to find ways to integrate the many databases
being created for the life sciences and to organize them to facilitate problem
solving, discovery and education."
To enable this rapid exploration of data and comprehensive mathematical modeling
of life on Earth, data structures and query languages will be created, guided by
a think tank of Cornell researchers -- in time to include experts from around
the world -- in the biological, computer and physical sciences. For example, the
large-scale data integration will make it possible computationally to examine
the effects of drug molecules on their environment and ecology.
Cornell's wide-ranging experience in international education and research
springs from its pioneer work in agricultural development in what is now Nanjing
University, China, in the early 20th century. In the Philippines, Cornell helped
form the University of the Philippines Los Baņos and assisted in the rebuilding
of the country's agricultural system after World War II. In Uganda in the 1990s,
Cornell, with World Bank support, coordinated and administered the external
degree component of a program to enhance the human resource development of
Uganda's universities. Cornell has U.S. Department of Agriculture grants in
Armenia, Honduras, Thailand and South
Africa, as well as Ford, Rockefeller and Hilton foundation-funded initiatives in
Africa and Asia, and some 25 international collaborative projects in Madagascar
and Ethiopia.