As the University pushes toward its third year of heavily investing in faculty and infrastructure in the sciences, it's difficult not to see the direction natural sciences are slanting - both at Duke and nationally.
"Everything is getting pulled toward biology," said James Siedow, vice provost for research.
More than two-thirds of chemistry professors are investigating projects with direct biological applications, and seven of the 28 tenure-track professors in computer science are engaged in research related to computational biology.
By design, many of the University's strategic initiatives center around biologically-inspired research. But some of this shift has been unintentional. Alan Biermann, chair of computer science, said it was coincidental that the research interests of so many faculty have moved in that direction.
"We were really surprised when we stood back and realized that all but one of the algorithms people were working on computational biology," he said.
But in other ways, the movement toward biological research has been deliberate. As faculty in the other sciences struggle to draw funds, which are more readily available for research with biological applications, they have looked at questions relevant to the life sciences and genomics.
"That's where the grants are," said Linda McGown, professor of chemistry. "If the money shifts to other areas, you'll probably see the research shift again." Although McGown was trained as an analytical chemist, she has focused her recent research on DNA.
The trend toward biology is occurring nationwide, but at Duke the effect seems especially dramatic. One of the University's strengths in the past has been health research - driven by the School of Medicine and, in part, by the zoology section of the biology department. The second major area of emphasis has been evolutionary, historical biology - centered in the biological anthropology and anatomy department and in the former botany department, which merged with zoology in 2000 to form a unified biology department.
As other departments, such as chemistry and computer science, became more interdisciplinary, their research interests naturally tended toward these strengths. But since a relatively small amount of funding is available for historical sciences, biology and genomics have influenced all aspects of science.
"I think that because of the strong medical center, biologically oriented chemistry has been a natural way to continue to pull the department," said chemistry professor David Beratan.
The movement toward biology has coincided with the implementation of the University's strategic plan, which places an emphasis on several science initiatives - all of which center around experimental sciences and most of which involve biology substantially.
"Natural sciences are going towards a lot more internal cooperation, with biology at the center of that," said William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. "It's clear that biology isn't the driver but the nexus."
Grant spending has increased nearly 25 percent under the guidance of the strategic plan. Much of that growth has come from biology, and another substantial part has come from computer science and chemistry. Growth in physics, which has fewer opportunities to interface with biology, has been minimal.
As the University shifts its efforts toward research, especially research with the potential to be financially lucrative, it seems that the historical and natural sciences are getting left behind.
The hallmark of this type of science has been biological anthropology and anatomy, for a long time Duke's only standout in the sciences. The highest-ranked science department at the University, BAA studies fossils and morphology in an attempt to understand the evolution and origin of human behavior. But due to a change in administrative and departmental organization, the department will contract from 17 to nine faculty over the next several years.
Several professors have suggested that this signifies a withdrawal of University support from historical sciences, in which grants are smaller and fewer than they are in experimental fields. But administrators say this aspect of science is still a part of the University's future plans.
What Duke did in the past, said Berndt Mueller, dean of the natural sciences, was to devote the bulk of its resources into strong departments, such as BAA. Unlike biology and chemistry, these departments tended to have low research costs, and thus the return on investment was immediate. Recently, however, Duke has focused its resources on areas that receive more substantial national funding.
"I don't want to say that we are no longer doing this, but we no longer restrict our focus to those areas," Mueller said. "It is fair to say that in the past five years, Duke has made a real effort to invest also in those fields in which grant money is available."
He added that funding for historical sciences has not been cut, but new funding - specifically money raised for the strategic plan - has been concentrated in other fields so the percentage of total quantity spent on such sciences is lower.
In response, the historical sciences have changed, focusing more on genomics - what Philip Benfey, chair of the biology department, has called the driving factor behind the whole shift toward biology. Once considered biologists' domain, the field has taken on a new prominence among all aspects of science.
"It's very critical to recognize that natural history, in a classic sense, is not where the center of biology is," Siedow said. "[Genomics] is where today's natural historians are. They've picked up newer technologies and adapted their research."
BAA has proposed moving the bulk of research in its department in the direction of evolutionary genomics, and members of the former botany department have similarly focused their work.
Yet even as other departments come closer to biology, Benfey is seeking to focus biology research at the interfaces with ecology, evolution and even math.
He said biology is just the field that most research questions overlap with at the moment. "The 21st century is the century of life sciences," he said, although he added that the focus might change. "I think most people would be foolish to try to direct what's going to be out there."
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