Annual Report Fiscal Year 2001/2002 - Human Frontier Science ...

Foreword
This has been an extraordinary year for the Human Frontier
Science Program. The changes approved by the HFSP Board
of Trustees in the spring of 2000 aimed at enhancing the impact
of our programs have been put into place, and already there are
promising signs that the changes are having their desired effect.
In June 2001, we held our first annual HFSP Awardees Meeting
in Turin, a meeting which embodied the international spirit and
goals of HFSP and which set a high standard for what we hope
will become a long-lasting annual tradition. And in November
2001, HFSP, in partnership with the European Science
Foundation, hosted a remarkable meeting in Strasbourg that
brought together heads of research funding agencies from
Europe, North America and Japan to discuss major problems
in our current approaches to promoting scientific careers, and
to sketch a new, more expansive model of science education
and training.
The central purpose of HFSP is to create and support networks
of highly creative and skilled scientists from different nations,
different cultures and different disciplines: to promote scientific
interchange across national and disciplinary boundaries in pursuit
of fundamental new approaches to critical problems in the life
sciences. There is increasing recognition that this mission is of
the utmost importance. As our opening plenary lecturer in Turin,
the pioneering molecular biologist Sydney Brenner remarked:
“All the natural sciences are converging on biology.” The life
sciences are undergoing a transformation in which scientists
are beginning to grapple with the immense and intricate
complexity of whole biological systems. This new phase of
the life sciences, exemplified by the completion of many genome
projects, will require new analytic approaches for probing the fine
structure of components of living processes; and new synthetic
approaches for assembling this “pointillist”, fine-grained
knowledge into comprehensive and dynamic pictures of life.
These new approaches will require the skills not only of geneticists,
molecular biologists, cell biologists and neuroscientists,
but of chemists, physicists, computational scientists and
mathematicians. Only through collaborations drawing on all
the resources of the natural sciences will this new phase
of biological science fulfill its vast potential for forging
an understanding of living systems that is quantitative, detailed
and deep: an understanding that will be the prerequisite to
an era of truly rational medical practice. Yet too often natural
scientists with complementary interests and skills remain
divided by artificial academic borders, borders that are often
reinforced by traditional discipline-based modes of scientific
funding and training.
In Turin, we heard reports from international teams of HFSP
grantees employing multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches
to key problems in developmental and evolutionary biology;
developmental and functional neuroscience; and to deep issues
in molecular and cell biology that impinge as well on such
critical biomedical problems as cancer, wound-healing and
immune system function. Moreover, in the latest round of HFSP
grants that have just been awarded, we are seeing even more
emphasis upon truly novel studies across major disciplinary
lines. The changes in HFSP funding guidelines, which make it
possible for vanguard interdisciplinary teams with excellent new
ideas and experimental strategies to join together without
the necessity of demonstrating preliminary results, appears to be
having its intended effect of encouraging an even greater spirit
of adventure and risk-taking among its grantees. Especially
pleasing are several interdisciplinary team projects aimed at
developing new technology for basic life science research.
All of us who have had long careers in science know that
scientific advances depend on the experimental tools available.
Indeed, in my own field of neuroscience, a chronology of major
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Annual Report for FY 2001