From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Fri Feb 27 2004 - 08:29:50 PST
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From: cunews_at_cornell.edu<mailto:cunews_at_cornell.edu>
To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu> ; CUNEWS-LIFE_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-LIFE_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu> ; CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L_at_cornell.edu> ; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 6:36 PM
Subject: Cornell News: Cornell partners on 'Library of Life'
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
FOR RELEASE: Feb. 26, 2004
Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27_at_cornell.edu<mailto:deb27_at_cornell.edu>
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.
<h3>Background
</h3>
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.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional
information on this news release. Some might not be part of the
Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their
content or availability.
Bridging the Rift: <http://ip.cals.cornell.edu/btr -30-
The web version of this release, with accompanying photos, may be
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