[extropy-chat] Information system to help scientists analyze mechanisms of social behavior

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com
Sun Sep 19 11:22:01 UTC 2004


>From Medical News Today: With a $5 million, five-year
grant from the National Science Foundation, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will create
BeeSpace, a system to help scientists analyze all
sources of information relevant to the mechanisms of
social behavior. 
The complex society of the Western honey bee, Apis
mellifera, will drive the information system. The
system will be a software environment that "will help
to shed light on an unprecedented scale on the
relationship between genes and how lives are carried
out in an animal society," said principal investigator
Bruce Schatz, professor of library and information
science. 
"We will take a fresh look at the fundamental problem
of the mechanism of behavior, whether behavior is
caused by nature or nurture," said Schatz, who also
directs the Community Architectures for Network
Information Systems (CANIS) Laboratory, a campus
resource for new information systems.
"Worries abound over the ethical implications of
genetic determinism," he said. "The goal of BeeSpace
is to help forge a deeper understanding of the
relationship between genes and behavior that
transcends nature-nurture. This project will use
genomic biology to demonstrate that what matters for
social behavior is that DNA is both genetically
inherited and environmentally responsive." 
BeeSpace was one of six awards totaling $30 million
announced today (Sept. 16) as part of the NSF's
Frontiers of Integrative Biological Research (FIBR), a
program now in its second year. BeeSpace will be
housed in the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), now
under construction on Gregory Drive in Urbana. The $75
million state-of-the-art facility, which will open in
mid-2006, will be home to 400 campus researchers in
three broad areas: systems biology, cellular and
metabolic engineering, and genome technology.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=13623



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