The scientists, government officials and supporters began meeting in Upson Hall Sept. 29 to plan the building of an advanced research laboratory, the Bridging the Rift (BTR) Center, on the border between Israel and Jordan, that will study the origins, inner workings and interdependencies of all the 20 million known species on Earth.
The meeting continues today, Sept. 30.
Last night President Jeffrey S. Lehman hosted a dinner for the participants at the Johnson Museum.
The BTR Center has become feasible thanks to recent advances in information technology and biological techniques. Steven Tanksley, Cornell's Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding and genetics, who described the project at the meeting yesterday, conceived the idea of amassing all of this information into a Library of Life in a laboratory for research and education on the border between Israel and Jordan, beginning with its prototype, the Library of the Dead Sea. Tanksley is the director of the Library of Life.
Ron Elber, professor of computer science at Cornell, who spoke at the meeting yesterday, says that the aim of the library is to assemble a digital catalog and living samples of all microbes, fungi, plants, insects, invertebrates and vertebrates in the Dead Sea region. Elber is leading a Cornell research team to develop the BTR Center databank to collect and analyze information.
The scientific program, which grew out of Cornell's $600 million New Life Sciences Initiative, will require collaboration among researchers in the biological, computer, mathematical and physical sciences, as well as in the fields of education and communication. The Bridging the Rift Foundation, which encourages collaboration among scientists throughout the Middle East, is raising funds and forging diplomatic ties to build the desert laboratory on land donated by Jordan and Israel.
Among those attending the meeting are, from Jordan, Lina Noureddin, from the Royal Hashemite Court, and Ibrahim Nazer, dean, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Jordan; from Israel, Zvi Ben Abraham, director, Minerva Dead Sea Research Center; and Lilach Morgan, Central Arava Regional Council; and from Stanford, Marcus Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of biological sciences and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies.
It is hoped that the first resident scientists, both senior and postdoctoral researchers drawn from Israeli and Jordanian universities as well as from Cornell and Stanford, will begin arriving at the desert center next year.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |