CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 395
The following sections are addressed to specific funding agencies.11.4.2 National Institutes of Health,
As the largest funder of life sciences research, the NIH has a special responsibility to support and
facilitate the building of bridges between biology and other disciplines, especially including computing.
The NIH has already taken a number of commendable steps in seeking to collaborate with other
agencies, including the formal NIGMS partnership with NSF for mathematical biology mentioned in the
previous section and other less formal partnerships with NSF and DOE for structural biology and the
National Center for Research Resources (NCRR)-NSF collaborations in instrumentation. As noted in
Chapter 10, a National Research Council report in 2003 called for NIH to increase investment in high-
risk, high-potential-payoff life sciences research that would be supported outside the usual NIH peer
review system.
Such steps, and others like them, are to be encouraged. At the same time, NIH must address
obstacles in a number of other areas that impede the building of bridges between biology and comput-
ing. One important issue is that cooperation across organizational boundaries within NIH leaves much
to be desired. Translational medicine will not arise from funding mechanisms that isolate narrow slices
of human biology, and yet the NIH structure is oriented toward specific diseases and body functions.^9
No component of a human works separately, in isolation. Most diseases are not single-gene defects,
most proteins act in macromolecular assemblies, organ systems interact by chemical messengers, the
immune system and the circulatory system not only work together but impact all organs of the body,
and so on. The NIH structure has been successful for many years, but the fact remains that its organiza-
tional structure tends to place similar restraints on cross-institute support for collaborative research
(Box 11.2).
A consequence of organization of research fields in biology by subfield (e.g., by disease, or by body
function) is that efforts that can benefit the entire community may suffer, even though specialization is
necessary to achieve depth of knowledge. The true value of the large-scale deployment of cyberinfra-
structure—and especially its data components—is that cyberinfrastructure spans disciplines to inte-
grate findings in one subfield with findings in another subfield—to connect information from one
subfield to another subfield, perhaps even via a third subfield. In the absence of explicit direction and
coordination, cyberinfrastructure in one subfield is likely to be incompatible in important ways with
cyberinfrastructure designed and deployed in another. Achieving coordination is likely to require a
level of cooperation across agencies that is substantially greater than has historically been true. It will
also require a level of planning and agency involvement in the actual design of the cyberinfrastructure
that does not typically happen in the funding of research, in which the role of program officers is
primarily to ensure a fair assessment of the science by peer reviewers. In supporting cyberinfrastructure,
program officers must act as procurement officers on behalf of the overall scientific community, and not
just as impartial brokers of an independent discipline-focused review process.
(^9) There are 20 institutes within the National Institutes of Health, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI); the National
Eye Institute (NEI); the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI); the National Human Genome Research Institute
(NHGRI); the National Institute on Aging (NIA); the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA); the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
(NIAMS); the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB); the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development (NICHD); the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD); the National
Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR); the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
(NIDDK); the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA); the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); the
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS); the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); the National Institute
of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS); the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR); and the National Library of
Medicine (NLM).