On March 9, Cornell University will participate in a groundbreaking ceremony 50 miles south of the Dead Sea, on the border between Israel and Jordan. Land donated by each country will be joined to form a 150-acre site for a research facility, the Bridging the Rift (BTR) Center (artist rendition at right*), which will include the world's first databank of information about all living systems.

The databank will be the core of the facility's centerpiece, the Library of Life, led by Cornell and Cornell 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."

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 (photo), a native of Israel who is chairman of Optic Solutions.

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.

Background

Cornell University is one of a handful of universities in the world making investments in excess of $500 million to modernize life sciences research and education programs. Through its New Life Sciences Initiative, Cornell is engaging several hundred researchers across its campuses in Ithaca and at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City in a broad program of education and investigation, integrating life sciences with physical, engineering and computational sciences.

Steven Tanksley, the Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding at Cornell University, says that the collection of data at the Library of Life is expected to take decades, by many research groups throughout the world. "Future advances in medicine, agriculture and environmental sciences will critically depend on the Library of Life," he says.

Tanksley says that collecting, cataloging and connecting data "will evolve into the new basis for creativity and discoveries about the origins, mechanisms and interconnectedness of life forms, and from that information we will embark on a new future on how we feed and clothe ourselves.

This information will also expand and, in some ways, change how we view ourselves, as the human species, in the larger context of life and the universe."

The library's director, Ron Elber, professor of computer science at Cornell, 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 region, creating a Library of the Desert. It is because the desert environment is not rich in life forms that comprehensive analysis of life sciences for this specific environment might be feasible in a relatively short time, he says. "This is important since the Library of Life will need to show some tangible outcomes in a few years. Hence, besides the obvious economical and ecological benefits to the region, the Library of the Desert will provide a prototype for the Library of Life and will sketch the structure for libraries of other regions richer in alternative life forms and more challenging to handle."

The complex nature of the data, he says, will require the development of new software and new database systems. "We will need to handle new information at an unprecedented scale as well as to integrate many existing databases. This is a very major undertaking -- besides the obvious challenge of collecting the data."

Making the Library of Life's huge data set accessible over the Web also will require a number of technical breakthroughs. A new language will be created integrating classification schemes of different life science disciplines, making it easy to navigate between the biology of the small and of the large. "The ties between biology and the information sciences have always been deep; this project will generate many hard questions for computing and information science, and provide opportunities to apply our technology to meeting basic human needs," says Robert Constable, dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell. "We will be challenged to find ways to integrate the many databases being created for the life sciences and to organize them to facilitate problem solving, discovery and education."

To enable this rapid exploration of data and comprehensive mathematical modeling of life on Earth, data structures and query languages will be created, guided by a think tank of Cornell researchers -- in time to include experts from around the world -- in the biological, computer and physical sciences. For example, the large-scale data integration will make it possible computationally to examine the effects of drug molecules on their environment and ecology.

Cornell's wide-ranging experience in international education and research springs from its pioneer work in agricultural development in what is now Nanjing University, China, in the early 20th century. In the Philippines, Cornell helped form the University of the Philippines Los Baños and assisted in the rebuilding of the country's agricultural system after World War II. In Uganda in the 1990s, Cornell, with World Bank support, coordinated and administered the external degree component of a program to enhance the human resource development of Uganda's universities. Cornell has U.S. Department of Agriculture grants in Armenia, Honduras, Thailand and South

Africa, as well as Ford, Rockefeller and Hilton foundation-funded initiatives in Africa and Asia, and some 25 international collaborative projects in Madagascar and Ethiopia.

*The architectural design for the planned Bridging the Rift Center
Mustafa Abadan and TJ Gottesdiener, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

Copyright © Cornell University

Stanford, California
March 3, 2004

In an effort to encourage scientific collaboration between Arab and Israeli students, the governments of Jordan and Israel have agreed to set aside 150 acres along their border for the construction of a major environmental research center that will be operated in collaboration with Stanford University and Cornell University.

Groundbreaking for the new Bridging the Rift Center will take place March 9 in a remote section of arid land along the Israeli-Jordanian border about 50 miles south of the Dead Sea. When construction is completed in three to five years, this small piece of desert will be transformed into a thriving science and technology village dedicated to studying the unique ecology of the Dead Sea region. The high-tech center will symbolically straddle the border so that half of the facility is in Israel and half is in Jordan.

Government officials, academicians and business leaders from both countries are expected to attend the groundbreaking ceremony, along with representatives from Stanford and Cornell - the two universities that will oversee academic research at the center.

''Stanford is a place where faculty and students from many countries and backgrounds come together to research, discuss and propose solutions to significant contemporary problems,'' said Stanford President John L. Hennessy. ''This center reflects the best of those values, and we have every hope that it will succeed in its important mission.''

The Stanford magnet

Seed money for the new research center was provided by the Bridging the Rift Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit organization that includes business executives, academicians and community leaders from Jordan, Israel and the United States.

''The BTR Foundation was the visionary behind the initiative,'' said businessman Mati Kochavi, chief executive officer of the foundation. ''We mobilized the governments to give the land, solved the security issues and worked with universities on the research and academic program.''

A native of Israel now living in New York, Kochavi speaks Hebrew and Arabic and frequently travels to Arab countries to see business associates and friends. It was Kochavi who came up with the idea of enlisting Stanford as a partner in the project.

''I called Cornell first because we thought the focus would be on agriculture, and Cornell has an excellent school of agriculture,'' he recalled. ''But the people we talked to in Jordan wanted to move toward plant biotechnology and biotechnology in general.''

Kochavi immediately thought of Stanford because of its reputation in combining science, technology and business. ''We needed a magnet to bring people together, and the opportunity of getting a Ph.D. from Stanford creates a magnet. People in the Middle East were more than excited when they heard about Stanford's willingness to be involved.''

Extreme environment

Eventually, both universities were brought in as academic partners, said Stanford geneticist Marcus W. Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. For the past three years, Feldman has chaired the academic planning committee of the foundation and made several trips to the Middle East to meet with officials and observe the proposed site.

''The center is located is an extremely interesting environment,'' he said. ''There are numerous organisms in the Dead Sea, the most saline body of water on Earth, and in the desert, one of the hottest places on the planet. How they are able to survive in such extreme conditions is of great interest to geneticists and other life scientists.''

The faculty at the center will consist of scientists from Stanford, Cornell and various Jordanian and Israeli universities. Feldman predicts that the number of students, staff, faculty and postdoctoral fellows at the center could reach 1,000. ''We expect people to come from all over the Middle East,'' he said. ''There's really no limit if people of good will want to participate.''

An important component of the center, added Kochavi, will be the Library of Life - a project that will allow Stanford and Cornell scientists to create a databank of all living organisms in the Dead Sea region.

''This center is the first of its kind in the Middle East - a hub for technology, research and education for all people in Middle Eastern countries and initially Jordan and Israel,'' he said. ''It is vital that we look past the disputes of the moment and have the courage and vision to work for a better future.''

Visionary project

Doctoral students from Jordan and Israel will begin applying to either Stanford or Cornell later this year. Those admitted will come to the United States for about two years, then return to the center to conduct laboratory and field research in desert ecology, explained Arthur Bienenstock, vice provost and dean of research at Stanford.

''I see the center as visionary, but I see Stanford as a place that has thrived on visionary endeavors,'' he said. ''I hope it's successful, because cooperation in that region is vital.''

Bienenstock, Feldman and several other members of the Stanford faculty plan to attend next month's groundbreaking, which will begin with a breakfast at the home of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Later that evening, King Abdullah II of Jordan will host an event at the Royal Court in Amman. According to Kochavi, both leaders strongly support the center, which was only approved after years of complex negotiations among ministries from both countries.

''Nothing has been simple about this project, but this kind of effort is necessary if you want to a make a shift in the Middle East paradigm,'' Kochavi said.

''The new center can serve science and peace simultaneously,'' Feldman noted. ''The development of a critical mass of professionals and researchers in science is also essential for more equitable economic advancement of the region. As Israelis and Jordanians study and work together with scholars from around the world, the benefits of peace will become too obvious to ignore.''