Understanding the Rules of Life Program: Scientific Advancements and Future Opportunities

Life sciences have become a core part of public policy and scientific solutions to address problems affecting nearly all aspects of society, including climate change, defense, public health and medicine, clean energy and energy independence, industry (i.e., the bioeconomy), agriculture, and sustainable development. Convergence of the life sciences with other scientific disciplines is a core enabler of advances across these sectors.

In 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established a program on Understanding the Rules of Life (URoL) to identify generalizable rules that govern biological systems at micro- and macro-scales. With support from this award, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Board on Life Sciences (NASEM) will conduct a retrospective analysis of the URoL program.

For this analysis, the NASEM will interact with URoL principal investigators individually and in group settings to understand the program’s: a) achievements; b) integration of multi-disciplinary, systems-level approaches; c) broader implications for studying highly-complex systems, future scientific questions, and future societal needs; and d) the production of generalizable rules that apply to different fields and scales. The outcomes from these discussions will be include a proceedings, which will be peer reviewed and published through the established NASEM processes.

The NSF URoL Big Idea challenged scientists across numerous disciplines to identify rules that govern how biological systems function at various scales and complexities, and determine which of those rules are generalizable across systems. The assessment and synthesis activities supported by this award are designed explicitly to: a) identify rules of life that apply within systems of similar scale and complexity; b) determine which of those rules also apply to systems of differing scales and complexity; and c) capture the contributions from the multidisciplinary teams in URoL-funded research towards providing insight into successful methods for collaborating across scientific disciplines.

NASEM has published several reports describing convergence of the life sciences with other disciplines, which will inform discussions with URoL investigators and the project outcomes. Critical themes from unstructured and structured discussions will be captured to ensure that the outcomes of the assessment are informative to NSF and the broader scientific community.

Furthermore, the knowledge gained about effective multidisciplinary research environments will enable future scientists to establish and lead multidisciplinary teams toward addressing future societal and scientific problems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.