Commentary in 2004

The research in biology has been transformed by the products of interdisciplinary research. Here we explore why it is challenging for universities to bring biologists together with engineers, physicists and computer scientists for productive collaboration, and we evaluate alternative solutions. In particular, we describe how the new Janelia Farm Research Campus of Howard Hughes Medical Institute aims to provide a home for creative scientists from different disciplines to attack major biomedical research problems.

With scientific research becoming more interdisciplinary, it is important to consider changing the way we teach undergraduates about science.

Fashions prevail in science as in all human affairs. In recent years, biochemistry has become less fashionable, but there is no doubt that the discipline is important for the full understanding of biology.

Two camps continue to evolve in the field of structural biology—a 'systems-oriented' camp, which studies proteins or complexes carefully one system at a time, and a 'discovery-oriented' one, which studies proteins of entire families, pathways or genomes. The end goals of both camps are the same: to decipher the atomic-resolution structures and mechanisms of biological macromolecules and understand them in the context of the living cell.

Structural genomics efforts are already producing a quarter of all 'new' macromolecular structures (<30% sequence identity to previously solved structures) and are stimulating development of systematic and automated approaches to structure determination. The thousands of new structures likely to be determined and the technologies and infrastructure likely to be developed over the next decade will benefit all biologists.

We know the basic principles of protein, RNA and DNA structure, and we have atomic coordinates of many proteins and RNAs. Structural biology must now expand the range of length and timescales on which we can represent the molecular reality of a cell. Structural molecular biology and structural cell biology must merge into a single discipline, and we must establish a lively intellectual complementarity with the nascent 'systems biology' of the cell.

Twenty-first century research in the life sciences is becoming an increasingly interdisciplinary endeavor where teams of scientists use tools and insights from a variety of fields to solve complex biological problems. By and large, our educational system has not kept up with these changes. How can science education and the life sciences curriculum better reflect the way students will do science when they leave the hallowed halls of academia?