Back to REPORTSMeredith A. Lane
Australian Academy of Science, GPO Box 783, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia
1998
Report of Meeting:
CANBERRA- In the carefully phrased world of science, few predictions are so boldly stated.
Yet recently Professor Sir Robert May, Chief Scientist of the UK, told the attendees at
the Australian Academy of Science-sponsored Conference on Biological Informatics that
"there will be winners, and there will be losers" among nations as the world
moves into the next century. Sir Robert underscored statements that have been made by
other international leaders. "The next century will be the 'Age of Biology', just as
this one has been an age of physics and astronomy. Specifically, those countries who best
know how to correlate, analyze, and communicate biological information will be in the
leading position to achieve economic and scientific advances."
The occasion was the Conference on Biological Informatics (July 6-8, 1998), at which 10
visiting and 22 Australian speakers from science and business presented their views of the
future of biology as it is affected by the information sciences. Professor Michael Pitman
(Foreign Secretary of the Australian Academy of Science) chaired the panel discussion that
closed the third day of the meeting. He noted that "the accumulation of biological
data for its own sake has become a useless exercise." In so doing, he echoed many of
the speakers in the Conference. Those same speakers, however, also repeated a refrain that
calls for "biological informatics" not only to cope with but to put to good use
the data that are, inexorably, accumulating.
"Informatics" is a new word in the English lexicon, but a powerful one. The
networking and computer technologies of the twentieth century have brought the concept of
"automatic information" to anyone who has used the World Wide Web to access
information resources for a term paper or who has used an online service to order a book
or to find a recording by a favorite artist. Informatics (a contraction of
"information" + "automatically") has become the expectation not only
of Web-surfers on a casual excursion into cyberspace, but also of bureaucrats, scientists,
serious students, and policy-makers who must make decisions about best-practice in
handling natural resources. Informatics is also a day-to-day expectation of doctors and
other health professionals who must call upon information stored in databases that may be
cached in computers that are physically very distant from the site of need for their
information.
"'Biological informatics' covers a lot of ground", said Professor Warren Ewens,
one of the speakers at the Conference. "The program at the University of Pennsylvania
in 'Bioinformatics' teaches students at various levels of expertise about the sorts of
software that are available and that are needed to analyze biological information at the
gene and chromosome levels of biological organization." In fact, among scientists who
investigate genes, chromosomes, proteins, and genomic levels of biological organization,
the contraction of "biological informatics" to "bioinformatics" seemed
a natural step.
However, this Conference demonstrated that confining the term "bioinformatics"
to data only from studies of genes and chromosomes is unduly restrictive. As Professor
John Stocker, Chief Scientist of Australia, noted during his address to the opening
session of the meeting, "this Conference is about the burgeoning application of
information science and technology to many biological fields, including biodiversity,
neuroscience, medicine and numerous other branches of biological science." Also, Dr
Stocker noted, "one of the more important aspects of the meeting is its opportunity
to build bridges among the various branches of biology". His remarks were echoed by
other speakers, many of whom paid tribute to the foresight of the Australian Academy in
having organized this meeting. It was a conference unique among other, similarly titled
meetings, because it included biodiversity, environmental, and medical informatics, as
well as neuroinformatics, molecular informatics, genomics, and informatics training all in
one discussion.
"Life is characterized by individuality, historicity, contingency, and a high
information content. There is no law of large numbers. Every living thing is truly
unique." So says Dr Robert Robbins, Vice President for Information Technology of the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Because no one human mind can keep track of the
histories, contingent events and individuality of multiple organisms (whether individuals,
populations or species), we need to employ the special capacities of computers for this
task. In order to better understand the world in which we live, we need the computational
capacity to collate, correlate, and analyze data about interactions among unique genes,
genomes, individual organisms, populations of organisms, or entire species--and we need
networking capacity to communicate the results of computations carried out among multiple
computers.
Conference participants came away with the realization that they had been exposed to a
much wider biological world than that they had previously known. Biodiversity informatics
seeks to provide data not only on individual species but also on the environmental
conditions favored by each species as well as the pharmaceutical or other value that a
species might provide to the economy. Environmental informatics seeks to correlate the
habitat requirements of many species at once in order to provide contingency scenarios so
that decision-makers can balance competing interests. Medical and neuroinformatics stretch
current capacities toward modeling the brain and re-creations of reality so that surgeons
and other practitioners can "practice" on "virtual" patients prior to
performing procedures on living people. Sequence informatics (genomics) has had the upper
hand for some years because of the immediately applicable (in pharmaceuticals development,
for instance) nature of the results of this research. Yet, it is clear that the limits
of each of these fields overlap with the boundaries of each of the others. There is a
great deal to be gained by sharing findings among levels of biological organization.
And, it seems, biology has something to learn from other fields of science. An example is
astrophysics, as pointed out during the Conference by Dr Ray Norris, the Head of
Astrophysics and Computing at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility. Astronomy
benefited greatly when all astronomers, regardless of subdiscipline, adopted a common file
format for electronic exchange of digital data. There is not yet such a common format for
data exchange among biological disciplines, though this meeting has pointed out the need
for such formats.
Professor Ashley Goldsworthy, Chairman of the Centre for International Research on
Communication and Information Technologies and Chair of the Information Industries
Competitiveness Study, pointed out that "tomorrow's wealth will be generated by the
information industries." He noted that there are key challenges, particularly in the
biological sciences including environmental science, to which Australia must prove equal.
If it does, according to Dr Goldsworthy and others at the Conference, it will come out
ahead in the global marketplace. Goldsworthy's comments strongly underscored those of Sir
Robert May. Clearly, if Australia invests in biological informatics research, it can be
among the winners in the "information revolution".
This stimulating and cross-cutting meeting was organized by a committee chaired by Dr Ebbe
Nielsen, Head of the Australian delegation to the OECD Megascience Forum's Working Group
on Biological Informatics. The Working Group will report to OECD governments on Biological
Informatics before the end of 1998. The Chair of the Working Group, Dr James Edwards of
the US National Science Foundation, as well as Dr Thomas Lovejoy (Chair of the Subgroup on
Biodiversity Informatics) of the World Bank and the Smithsonian Institution and Dr Stephen
Koslow (Chair of the Subgroup on Neuroinformatics) of the US National Institutes of Health
were among the speakers at the Conference. This international Conference on Biological
Informatics was sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science, in conjunction with the
Department of Industry, Science and Tourism, Environment Australia (Department of the
Environment), The British Council, AMRAD, and CSIRO.
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