NSF's Colwell: CU leads in study of biocomplexity

National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell speaks with Sol Gruner, professor of physics and director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), who is giving her a tour of the CHESS facility, April 14. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Roger Segelken

Researchers at Cornell are among the leaders in the new study of biocomplexity -- filling in the small pieces of a puzzle that ranges from the molecular level to the global and also trying to make sense of the big picture -- said National Science Foundation Director Rita R. Colwell in the annual Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lecture, April 16, in Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall, on campus.

After citing the achievements of senior scientists -- many of them funded by NSF -- the agency director said she was worried that younger researchers will have trouble gaining federal support for their studies.

The former University of Maryland microbiologist, who is known for explaining the link between cholera outbreaks and ocean temperatures (and perhaps global warming), has been doing some financial research in the nation's capital and she had some disappointing numbers to report.

Because of meager budgetary allocations to NSF, which will have about $5.3 billion to disburse this year, compared to about $13 billion received by NASA, "our young scientists are on a treadmill," Colwell said. She estimated that grant-writing scientists lose $100 million a year in time wasted during the preparation of otherwise worthy proposals -- proposals "that are very good and should be funded but can't be with current resources," she said.

NSF funding is awarded to some 200,000 researchers, including graduate students, each year, and the average NSF grant is worth $113,000, compared to $360,000 for the average grant from the National Institutes of Health, she noted.

Colwell's lecture was titled "Biocomplexity in the Environment: a 21st Century Odyssey." She said her 30-year study of the cholera microorganism, Vibrio colerae, and the copepod marine organisms that spread it in the sea both "led me to an appreciation of biocomplexity" and prompted the NSF's recent focus on that kind of study.

Although the NSF's mandate is basic science, she found a way to apply her discoveries about the tiny shrimp-like copepods that carry cholera in drinking water, Colwell said. She was able to recommend that women in Bangladesh, where most of her cholera field work was conducted, could filter out copepods and the microbe they carry by pouring water through several layers of fabric in their sari garments.

Colwell expanded on the sari story the day after her Iscol lecture while addressing a student colloquium of the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board (CURB), to make a point about interdisciplinary research. Purifying water with cloth filtration would never catch on in Bangladesh, Colwell had been told at the time, she said, because that was seen as "women's work" and involved women's clothing. So Colwell brought in social scientists knowledgeable about Bangladeshi customs, and they told her not to worry: "The men had been using sari cloth all along to filter flies out of their beer!" Colwell related.

Biocomplexity, Colwell said, lets us take the broader view, and new technologies help us to do so. New tools -- information technology, nanoscale science and engineering, and genomics -- "are expanding our vision, from the minute to the global and beyond, giving us a viable multidisciplinary approach to environmental research," she said.

Mary Hwang, left, a junior in engineering, attaches a bracelet she and junior Saemi Mathews made from organic-film transistors onto the wrist of National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell, as a thank-you gift after Colwell addressed the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board colloquium in Kaufmann Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, April 17. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

Colwell cited the work of Cornell's Karl Niklas, the L.H. Bailey Professor of Plant Biology, whose model of the relationship between above-ground biomass and below-ground biomass shows a near-universal pattern in the shapes and sizes of most seed-bearing plants. Niklas and a University of Arizona colleague "have shown how purely physical constraints shape the allocation of biomass," Colwell said. "With this model in hand, we can predict the biomass of roots and gain greater precision in models of carbon sequestration," an important consideration in tracking the whereabouts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

Colwell also singled out Mark Bain, Cornell associate professor of natural resources and leader of an NSF-funded study of biocomplexity in the lagoons and shores of the U.S. Great Lakes. Biocomplexity, she said, "isn't a new subject for you here at Cornell. With a tradition of cutting-edge research and the superb, multidisciplinary Center for the Environment, Cornell is in the business of inventing environmental studies," she acknowledged.

Speaking to undergraduates at the CURB colloquium in Kaufmann Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, Colwell told the undergraduate student-scientists to "snap up every opportunity to work with others in other countries and cultures" and not to hesitate to cross scientific disciplines "because the Earth's system is enormously complex."

And when going on to graduate school, Colwell advised the students, try to be teachers as well as researchers.

"You will learn first by doing, and then learn more by teaching," she promised. "You'll learn more because you have to be at least one experiment ahead of your students."