Cornell and Stanford to work with Israel and Jordan on Bridging the Rift research center
to include world's first databank for all living systems

Architect's conception of the first building of the Bridging the Rift project. Copyright Archimation / Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

The databank will be the core of the facility's centerpiece, the Library of Life, led by Cornell and Stanford University scientists who will gather, organize and model information to quantify and characterize all living systems. The library will be a research and education center operating a databank, yet to be developed, that will assemble information on living systems, from microbes to plants to animals, using digital images and global positioning data. Information also will flow from ecological and environmental investigations, molecular research and DNA sequencing.

The research center will develop computer modeling systems to make predictions at genetic levels and to help understand coevolution of species and the ways in which ecology affects DNA, and the reverse. Both Cornell and Stanford will offer doctoral degrees at the BTR Center.

Cornell President Jeffrey S. Lehman, who will attend the ceremony at the border site (it is known as central Arava on the Israeli side and Wadi Araba on the Jordanian side), says, "This project is an enormous undertaking, one that will require the collaboration of scientists from every corner of the world. We are grateful that the governments of Israel and Jordan have taken the first steps to show how this collaboration can evolve. This is a unique scientific environment, the perfect place to begin the project."

Mati Kochavi

Because the new databank will gather a hugely diverse amount of information about living systems, it will be a major advancement over GenBank, the database operated by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. GenBank, which stores genetic sequences, is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which also includes the DNA DataBank of Japan and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

The Library of Life was proposed by Steven Tanksley, the Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding at Cornell, who will be a key adviser on the project. The library's director will be Ron Elber, professor of computer science at Cornell. The early work of the library will be to develop a prototype, the Library of the Desert, which will be a digital catalog that includes living samples of microbes, fungi, plants, insects, invertebrates and vertebrates in the Dead Sea region. New computer languages and databases will be created to integrate the massive amounts of data flowing into the library.

BTR Foundation, which is providing seed money for the BTR Center, is headed by New York City businessman Mati Kochavi, a native of Israel.

This is Cornell's second teaching and research initiative in the Middle East. Last year, the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City opened a campus in Qatar, the first higher education institution in that country to be coeducational. Cornell is the first American university to offer its M.D. degree overseas.