The Next Wave of Biotechnology: Will the Crest Support the Weight of Success?

Dr. Roger Beachy, NIFA Director and USDA Chief Scientist; ASPB Annual Meeting 2010; August 4, 2010; Montreal, Canada.

Thank you very much, Dr. Ho, for the gracious introduction. It is an honor for me to be here today – to meet friends, former colleagues, and people that I have admired for many years.

I can’t tell you how very much it means to me, as a scientist, to have spent some time here with ASPB colleagues, sharing some of the excitement and passion that drives us as scientists, and the commitment to making lives better for people around the world through the work that we do. I wish time would have permitted me to be here for a longer period.

I haven’t been in Washington all that long, but I can tell you that it’s sometimes hard to keep this passion, this drive, foremost in my mind when my days are filled with meetings and my email is filled with the many details of running a Federal agency.  Science has always offered me the opportunity to step back from considering other challenges that came with the roles in which I’ve found myself:  providing a change of focus from policy and financial decisions to the hard core intrigue of how molecules function to effect phenotype and adaptation to environment, and trying to use that knowledge to improve agriculture and ultimately the lives of those that science must serve.

The capability to make the leap from science to policy has never been more important to me or to the job that the President has asked me to do as Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.  It is clear to even the most casual observer of science that we are, as a recent editorial in the journal BioScience notes, in the Age of Biology.  Biotechnology, genomics, nanotechnology, data and knowledge management, and much more:  clearly, we are riding the crest of a profound era of science that is characterized by understanding the basic mechanisms of life, of natural systems, and the profound consequences of human endeavor in those systems.  And when you’re on the crest of the wave in your science it can be a real head rush, one that takes you beyond the needs of the world’s peoples to the ethereal desire for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I urge you to look into the reasons for the research that you do and find the time, make the effort, to either use the knowledge, or pass the knowledge to others, to address the needs of society.

Many of you here have made a point of reminding me of the importance of fundamental discovery to agriculture:  You can be assured that I am well aware that this is the case.  My own research career has included highly fundamental research as well as biotechnology. Nevertheless, as a small agency, one that currently has little flexibility in its budget, NIFA must make its choices of how much support will be devoted to discovery, or foundational, research and how much on projects that embrace basic and translational research, education and extension outreach to agricultural communities. I will continue to request your input as we prioritize the many possible areas on which to focus, so that in the end we can achieve measurable outcomes for American and global agriculture in the short to mid-term, while we also support research that ensures the success of American agriculture into the future. That too, can take you to the crest of knowledge that satisfies the desire to serve society.

When one is on the crest of a wave in the sea, or riding the powder of the mountains, you often don’t see the rocks and sea churn, or the bumps and cliffs that lie beneath.  And believe me, there is turmoil, there are reefs, and there are rocks underneath the crest of this “Next Wave of Biotechnology” that we are experiencing. The churn involves both how science will be done, and how the products of the knowledge that might be delivered through biotechnology will be regulated, distributed, controlled.

As many of us know, the first exciting wave of biotechnology – that which promised us disease and pest resistant crops, abundant foods with fewer chemical inputs and better environmental stewardship – slowed to a crawl as the realities of product development and a regulatory burden made it difficult for those of us in academic science and in the private sector to deliver on the promises of the science of the early ‘80s and through the end of the century.

In the current decade we are coming to grips with the reality  that science must focus on solving the ‘grand societal challenges’ – however you define them, that we face as a global society.  Simultaneously we recognize that the contexts of contemporary biology are completely changing the way we do science.  As the recent NAS report on “A New Biology for the 21st Century” points out, science will be increasingly interdisciplinary and team-driven rather than individual-investigator driven.  Moreover, the work we do in biology will be increasingly cross-sector:  Federal, state, university, corporate, non-profit, wherever the appropriate synergies exist.

This is sort of churn and turmoil that I referred to earlier.  As we at NIFA have been working to re-orient the competitive grants programs around these new ways of doing business, we’ve run straight into the blunt reality that some of the things that wish to accomplish do not fit well with our current way of funding science or the expectations of the research community.  Our research in the past has been heavily investigator focused – we changed that in 2010 and asked for more interdisciplinary teams to address larger challenges. Going forward, we will establish a 30/70 split in our funding, with 30 percent being traditional principal investigator grants and 70 percent devoted to team efforts.  I’ll say more about what those teams need to include in a moment.

This change in how research will be done may have profound implications for the way universities reward success, establish salaries, and grant tenure. Typically, tenure does not recognize the tremendously valuable contributions of team members, junior or senior.  It usually recognizes principal investigators, and independence of thought. In many of our colleges and universities tenure tends to reward research discovery and innovation in the lab more than applied research, education, and extension activities.  We have to find a way to ensure that teamwork is rewarded in the tenure process.

And we need to recognize – here in this room, in our grant writing and proposal preparation, and in our tenure processes -- ALL of the teamwork that goes into the larger cross disciplinary grants.  Research at USDA and in agriculture in general is a continuum from foundational, basic research at the lab bench; to applied research in the field and greenhouse; to translational research that explains to farmers, foresters, and others what our research means for them; and educational work to ensure that our research findings are available to the next generation of scientists, and that they inform the national conversations about science. These concerns have also played a role in some of the changes that are taking place at the NIH and to a lesser degree at the NSF.  Outcomes, in this case the linking of discovery science to people’s lives, do make a difference: the American people, including Congress, expects outcomes.