From Plant Press, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2000.
We have entered a “New Century of Biology” in which we expect to witness an explosion of discoveries that will revolutionize the biological sciences and in particular the relationship of human society to the environment. Just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and others made revolutionary breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical world and the universe in past centuries, major conceptual breakthroughs in our understanding of the biological world are imminent. Our conceptualization of the biological world has already been marked by progress in such areas as understanding the processes of evolution and ecology, the biochemical structure of DNA, and the simple, but critical, calculation of the magnitude of biodiversity on the planet. In the New Century advances in the biological sciences will be made in an age of new technologies, in a rapidly changing environment caused by human activities, and with a new relationship to global economics and social structure.
The voyages of discovery of the early naturalists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were in many ways the beginning of the study of modern organismal biology. The exploration of unknown lands and habitats funded by monarchs and wealthy supporters led to the discovery of many new kinds of plants, animals, and microorganisms, both fossil and contemporary. The early naturalists focussed their attention on species and populations as well as the habitats in which these organisms were found. These broadly trained biologists studying the past as well as the present biota provided the raw data that were critical for the shaping of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. A rigorous scientific explanation for the origin of complex biological systems had been formulated. Such organism-based studies have continued to the present resulting in the development of the fields of systematics, population biology, community ecology and ecosystem/landscape-level sciences.
In the mid-1900s the biological community also experienced the emergence of a reductionist approach to studying life. The new biologists were strongly influenced by the physicists and mathematicians, and attempted to investigate biological complexity by fracturing it into its essential constituents. The focus of many biologists, as well as the value placed by society and governments on biological research, abruptly shifted from the organism to the cell and its parts. The era of the gene and the macromolecule began. The last decades of the 20th Century saw tremendous advances in our understanding of genetic control, cellular functions, biochemical interactions and regulations, as well as the initiation of a complete sequencing of the metazoan genome.
Now in the New Century we have a better understanding of biology at both the lower levels (i.e., cellular and molecular) and the higher levels (i.e., population, ecosystem, and global) of organization. We are poised to reassemble into a synthetic biological reality the elemental parts that have been carefully dissected by the molecular and cell biologist as well as population and ecosystem ecologists over the last 50 years.
The consensual marriage of organismal biology with the advanced scientific tools of technology will be an essential element for our progress in understanding global “biocomplexity” during the decades to come. Most scientists agree that global environments face a tremendous threat as human populations expand and natural resources are consumed. As natural habitats rapidly disappear, the next century will be our last opportunity to fully understand the extent of the biological complexity of the planet; this understanding will be dependent on the effective adaptation and utilization of new technologies.
As botanists and plant hunters, we can envision that in the New Age of Exploration of the 21st Century the electronic naturalist equipped with GPS, palm-top computers, web-based communication, and mini-DNA samplers will comb the remaining unexplored habitats of the earth identifying and recording the characters and habitats of plant species not yet known to science. The information gathered by these botanical gladiators during their travels to remote and often inhospitable lands will be sent with the speed of the internet to their colleagues back in the lab, where the genetic composition and phylogenetic position in the tree of life of each new species will be instantaneously determined. The habitat data will be modeled with unparalleled speed and accuracy by super computers to determine the place of each species in its respective ecosystem. And the biochemical constituents of each species will be automatically screened and analyzed for any compounds that may be of benefit to society. Our vision of discovering and describing the complete natural world will become a reality.
In a more general sense a major goal for biologists in the New Century must be to define an effective strategy for integrating biological sciences with global economics and human social structure. The impending changes in the basic biological functioning of the planet, resulting from the unprecedented level of social and economic development, will continue to have a profound effect on human populations. Global well-being will depend on a concerted effort to integrate biological information, economic needs, and social organization.
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