Implementing the Organismal Agenda

an agenda,” then you’ve grasped the problem. Those of us who study biology at the organismal level usually identify ourselves as something else—herpetologist, evolutionist, or ecologist, for example. Our professional societies are similarly arranged. It is therefore unsurprising that organismal biology perennially has been given short shrift in research support, not to mention faculty appointments and professional prestige. As a group, we’ve fallen far since the days of scientists such as Richard Owen (the celebrity comparative anatomist who founded the British Museum of Natural History). Despite occasional chest pounding, organismal biologists have failed to act en masse, while other fields have loudly proclaimed their primacy in the biologi-cal hierarchy. This failure is all the more tragic because organismal information is increasingly recognized as both the crux of critical biological questions and the bottleneck in our attempts to answer them (e.g., NRC 2009).In 2009, the National Science Foun-dation (NSF) asked the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) to identify the “grand challenges in organismal biology” (GCOB). There was a sense of urgency under the new presidential administration, and the NSF was setting its own funding priorities. After broad discussion, SICB’s executive committee conceived a set of critical research areas (see Schwenk et al. 2009 for details):• Understanding the organism’s role in organism-environment linkages• Utilizing the functional diversity of organisms• Integrating living and physical systems analysis• Understanding how genomes produce organisms• Understanding how organisms walk the tightrope between stability and changeHere I propose a personal view of four elements necessary in any plan to implement the organismal agenda as set forth in the grand challenges.