|
Highlights of the testimony by Aristides Patrinos
1. DOE made many important contributions to biological research since the
early days of the Atomic Energy Commission, including the field of nuclear
medicine.
2. NIH and DOE joined forces in launching the Human Genome Project (HGP) in
1990. Since then our two agencies have worked closely in managing this seminal
research endeavor. The partnership has been a model of interagency collaboration
with each agency contributing its unique strengths and capabilities and creating
a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
3. NIH and DOE, with a strong international involvement, completed the HGP just
last month more than two years ahead of schedule and several hundreds of million
dollars under the initially estimated budget.
4. The HGP inspired a paradigm shift in biological research from a pure
hypothesis-driven "small science" approach to more of a
resource-driven approach. The HGP also highlighted the importance of
interdisciplinary research, including the physical sciences, automation
engineering, and computational science.
5. Modern biological research, including genomics and the study of proteins,
rely on research tools developed by the physical sciences, such as the
synchrotron radiation sources and nuclear magnetic resonance systems for protein
crystallography.
6. The DOE Office of Science builds and operates many of the scientific user
facilities (such as the X-ray sources) that are increasingly being used by life
scientists in their research. This symbiotic NIH-DOE relationship is expected to
continue and even grow.
7. The DOE follow up to the HGP is the Genomes to Life (GTL) program. GTL was
developed over the last three years by the Biological and Environmental Research
Advisory Committee of the DOE Office of Science with significant input by the
broad scientific community.
8. GTL adopts a "systems biology" approach to the study of microbes
and microbial communities. GTL does not include any research on human biology.
9. GTL is a basic research effort that is aimed at long-term solutions to
several DOE problems. These include the bioremediation of mixed waste at many of
DOE contaminated sites; the enhanced sequestration of carbon by the terrestrial
and marine biosphere in order to reduce the atmospheric concentration of
greenhouse gases and; the development of clean energy sources such as hydrogen.
10. GTL will marry the tools of modern molecular biology with advanced
scientific computers to provide highly accurate simulations of microbial systems
and their interactions with the environment.
11. GTL proposes to build four scientific user facilities to enable its
high-throughput research activities, including the production of proteins and
protein tags as well as advanced systems for the intracellular imaging of
microbes.
12. We expect continuing close collaborations with NIH on GTL and other
programs. GTL will involve scientists from the academic community, our national
laboratories and private institutions such as Craig Venter's Institute for
Biological Energy Alternatives.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
I am pleased to testify before the Subcommittee about the future of genomic
research at DOE. I am also prepared to discuss the Genomes to Life program and
our interactions with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
DOE is proud of the contributions we have made to biological research since the
early days of the Atomic Energy Commission and of the role we have played in the
Human Genome Project (HGP). The NIH and DOE joined forces in 1990 to launch the
HGP and we have worked closely over the years to reach the successful completion
of the project last month almost two years ahead of schedule and several hundred
million dollars under the original estimate of $3 billion. The partnership with
the NIH in the HGP has been a model of interagency cooperation with each agency
contributing its unique culture and strengths to create a whole that was truly
greater than the sum of the parts. The DOE brought to the HGP its strengths in
the managerial arena: an impressive network of national laboratories, each with
its own area of scientific expertise. DOE leaders' experience in managing
large-scale projects (mostly in the physical sciences) provided critical input
to the HGP, starting during the formative years and continuing through today.
With the successful completion of the HGP we are entering an exciting new era of
biological research greatly enhanced by the modern tools of molecular biology
that have been enabled by genomics. This new era of biological research offers
the promise of revolutionary solutions to challenges we face across a remarkable
spectrum - from agriculture to carbon sequestration to clean affordable energy
to the environment to industrial processes to medicine to national security to
name but a few. While technologies and research tools will be developed and
shared across disciplines, Federal agencies, academia, industry, and
international borders, as they were in the Human Genome Project, the specific
research challenges and needs will not be shared.
Strategies that NIH will use for understanding disease processes and for
developing improved diagnostics and cures will differ greatly from those needed
to develop new ways to sequester excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
produce abundant and affordable supplies of clean energy, and clean up
contaminated waste sites. Although completion of the HGP will thus lead to
somewhat divergent research paths, NIH and DOE will continue to coordinate
research efforts and explore opportunities for collaboration and cooperation.
Such opportunities will emerge from both the many NIH-DOE ties as well as
through the interagency forums led by the Office of Science and Technology
Policy in the Executive Office of the President.
DOE's entry into this new era is the Genomes to Life (GTL) program that has been
developed with broad scientific community input and led by the Biological and
Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC). The focus of the GTL program
is on microbes and microbial communities and seeks to harness their properties
and capabilities to address DOE needs in environmental bioremediation, carbon
sequestration, and clean energy production such as generating hydrogen.
The research approaches and tools that DOE needs to understand microbes so well
that we can use them to help solve DOE challenges will, in many cases, be very
different than those used by NIH to study disease-causing microbes. DOE needs to
understand the nature and biochemical capabilities of microbes in the oceans and
in subsurface environments - sites and microbes not likely to be of significant
interest to NIH - since the microbes in those environments are the ones that we
need to put to work to help us solve energy and environmental challenges. In
addition, most of the microbes that DOE needs to understand, live and
"work" as parts of complex communities made up of hundreds or
thousands of different microbes - a scientific challenge very different from the
challenges faced by NIH's need to understand disease-causing microbes.
We believe that many of the scientific discoveries in this new century will
happen at the interfaces of scientific disciplines, including the interfaces
between biology and the physical and computational sciences. Modern biological
research will increasingly rely on the scientific tools that are developed by
the physical sciences. One example is the determination of the structure of
biological molecules using the synchrotron radiation sources, neutron sources
and nuclear magnetic resonance facilities. Most of these facilities are built
and operated by DOE and the number of their users from the life sciences has
grown from a few percentage points to approximately forty percent in just the
last ten years. Another example is advanced simulation of cellular processes
using high performance supercomputers. The new generation of medical imagers
will also require significant computational resources for the processing of vast
amounts of data.
We envision many significant opportunities for future collaborations between NIH
and DOE as scientific research becomes more interdisciplinary and more reliant
on cutting-edge scientific tools. Many of these tools will be developed by the
DOE research programs for DOE applications and some of these tools will be
considered by NIH for applications to human biological research and for medical
applications. We expect to continue our regular and productive dialog with our
NIH colleagues to identify such opportunities for collaboration and to help make
them happen.
Despite its microbial focus the GTL program will enable many collaborations with
our NIH colleagues, including those from the National Human Genome Research
Institute, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, and the National
Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Discoveries that may serve the
DOE missions in bioremediation, carbon sequestration, and clean energy
production may prove relevant to applications in human health and medicine.
Similarly, insights derived form the study of human biology may help us properly
tweak microbial systems to serve DOE needs.
Many have called this new century the "century of biology" because of
its promise in providing new solutions to many of humanity's problems. At DOE we
plan to exploit these new biological advances for the benefit of the Nation and
we expect that our productive research partnership with the NIH will continue
and even expand.
I would be pleased to answer your questions.
|
