Author: Board on Life Sciences

For over a century, field stations have been important entryways for scientists to study and make important discoveries about the natural world. Th...

Since the 1980s, national and international planetary protection policies have sought to avoid contamination by terrestrial organisms that could co...

Microbial forensics is a scientific discipline dedicated to analyzing evidence from a bioterrorism act, biocrime, or inadvertent microorganism or t...

Stem cells offer tremendous promise for advancing health and medicine. Whether being used to replace damaged cells and organs or else by supporting...

During the last decade, national and international scientific organizations have become increasingly engaged in considering how to respond to the b...

The BioWatch program, funded and overseen by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has three main elementssampling, analysis, and responseeach...

The Earth's population, currently 7.2 billion, is expected to rise at a rapid rate over the next 40 years. Current projections state that the Earth...

Climate change poses risks to human health and well-being through shifting weather patterns, increases in frequency and intensity of heat waves and...

The National Research Council's Roundtable on Public Interfaces of the Life Sciences held a 2-day workshop on January 15-16, 2015, in Washington, D...

The US Department of Defense (DOD) is faced with an overwhelming task in evaluating chemicals that could potentially pose a threat to its deployed ...

At the request of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, the National Academies convened a committee to examine lessons learne...

People's desire to understand the environments in which they live is a natural one. People spend most of their time in spaces and structures design...

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax letters, the ability to detect biological threats as quickly as possible became a top p...

In 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established a five-year program on Understanding the Rules of Life (URoL) to identify generalizable ...

The National Research Council (NRC) and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) have released a new report, Community Colleges in the Evolving STEM E...

Outbreaks of animal disease can have catastrophic repercussions for animal agriculture, the food supply, and public health. Rapid detection, diagno...

The field of quantum information science (QIS) has witnessed a dramatic rise in scientific research activities in the 21st century as excitement ha...

BioWatch is an air monitoring system deployed in jurisdictions around the country with the goal of detecting the presence of certain high risk path...

On October 17, 2014, spurred by incidents at U.S. government laboratories that raised serious biosafety concerns, the United States government laun...

A Research Strategy to Examine the Taxonomy of the Red Wolf provides independent guidance about taxonomic research on the red wolf, Canis rufus. B...

Scientists strive to develop clear rules for naming and grouping living organisms. But taxonomy, the scientific study of biological classification ...

BioWatch is the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) system for detecting an aerosolized biological attack using collectors that are positione...

On June 27-28, 2018, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) convened an international workshop...

Biological physics, or the physics of living systems, has emerged fully as a field of physics, alongside more traditional fields of astrophysics an...

Safeguarding U.S. agriculture from foreign animal diseases and protecting our food system require cutting-edge research and diagnostic capabilities...

Research on gene drive systems is rapidly advancing. Many proposed applications of gene drive research aim to solve environmental and public health...

Spurred on by new discoveries and rapid technological advances, the capacity for life science research is expanding across the globeand with it com...

When, in late 2011, it became public knowledge that two research groups had submitted for publication manuscripts that reported on their work on ma...

Biological collections are a critical part of the nation's science and innovation infrastructure and a fundamental resource for understanding the n...

Advances in the life sciences - from the human genome to biotechnology to personalized medicine and sustainable communities - have profound implica...

Evolution is the central unifying theme of biology. Yet today, more than a century and a half after Charles Darwin proposed the idea of evolution t...

Traditionally, the natural sciences have been divided into two branches: the biological sciences and the physical sciences. Today, an increasing nu...

Undergraduate research has a rich history, and many practicing researchers point to undergraduate research experiences (UREs) as crucial to their o...

Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security is a study on the ethical, legal, and societal issues relating to the research on...

Convergence of the life sciences with fields including physical, chemical, mathematical, computational, engineering, and social sciences is a key s...

Quantum concepts hold the potential to enable significant advances in sensing and imaging technologies that could be vital to the study of biologic...

Biomedical research results in the collection and storage of increasingly large and complex data sets. Preserving those data so that they are disco...

In December 2019, new cases of severe pneumonia were first detected in Wuhan, China, and the cause was determined to be a novel beta coronavirus re...

One of the holy grails in biology is the ability to predict functional characteristics from an organism's genetic sequence. Despite decades of rese...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in collaboration with the InterAcademy Partnership and the European Academies Science...

Research and innovation in the life sciences is driving rapid growth in agriculture, biomedical science, information science and computing, energy,...

Legionnaires' disease, a pneumonia caused by the Legionella bacterium, is the leading cause of reported waterborne disease outbreaks in the United ...

Coral reefs are critical to ocean and human life because they provide food, living area, storm protection, tourism income, and more. However, human...

Coral reef declines have been recorded for all major tropical ocean basins since the 1980s, averaging approximately 30-50% reductions in reef cover...

For nearly a century, scientific advances have fueled progress in U.S. agriculture to enable American producers to deliver safe and abundant food d...