{"id":223037,"date":"2016-08-22T12:47:32","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T15:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=223037"},"modified":"2016-08-24T14:52:48","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T17:52:48","slug":"the-birth-of-a-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-birth-of-a-field\/","title":{"rendered":"The birth of a field"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cover story<\/a> of this month\u2019s issue captures a rare moment in the making of science: the birth of a new field.\u00a0 Biologists and geologists who are studying the formation of Amazonia and the Atlantic Forest have embarked upon a type of cooperation that embraces multi-disciplinarity.\u00a0 To move forward in their investigations, the two groups of scientists from very different disciplines realized that they needed more than just scarce information about the subjects outside their scope of expertise.\u00a0 They needed to further investigate each other\u2019s fields and work together from the time questions are first being considered.\u00a0 The combination of specialties to study the forests has given rise to what since 2014 we have called \u201cgeogenomics\u201d a new field of studies that include biology and geology.<\/p>\n

One specialty alone, however, is not enough to explain the complexity of the Amazon or the Atlantic Forest.\u00a0 Learning how the biodiversity of large swaths of forest was formed requires study of plant life as well as how rivers, mountains and everything that lies beneath them emerged.\u00a0 Rivers are natural barriers to the movement of organisms, but they were not always found where they are today because the regions have undergone significant transformations when we account for the geological scale of millions of years.\u00a0 New methods of mineral dating, for example, can change our understanding of the evolution of flora and fauna.\u00a0 There are also studies where paleoclimatologists are using genomic data to test hypotheses formulated by geologists.<\/p>\n

One significant impetus to the new field of studies has come from the collaboration between the Biota-FAPESP program and Dimensions of Biodiversity, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States.\u00a0 Since 2012, the two agencies have supported biodiversity projects that involve gathering large groups of researchers from different specialties, thus allowing analysis of enormous amounts of information that has been collected.\u00a0 Judging by the enthusiasm demonstrated by participants in the United States and in Brazil, it won\u2019t be long before there are new findings.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

When society expresses urgency with regard to issues of public health, researchers are invariably invited to seek solutions.\u00a0 Emergence of the Zika virus in Brazil and its grave consequences has mobilized a large number of scientists and medical laboratories all over the world. We can measure this by the number of scientific articles that have been published.\u00a0 From 1952 to 2015, Pubmed<\/em>, a database of papers in the field of biomedicine, registered some 218 studies about the virus.\u00a0 At this point, just three months into 2016, there have been 307 studies.\u00a0 There are as yet no solutions in sight, although just starting to get a grasp of the problem in such a short period of time already constitutes progress.\u00a0 The report that begins on page 48 presents some of the studies that are beginning to demonstrate that Zika does indeed cause microcephaly.<\/a><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The interview with anthropologist Eunice Durham<\/a> provides a view of universities and teaching that is unusual among academicians regardless of field. With her extensive experience as professor, researcher and manager of agencies associated with higher education, she advocates for an educational system that is at once diverse and flexible.\u00a0 She claims there is limited pedagogical competence in elementary education and almost no assessments of merit because teachers are not evaluated.\u00a0 Her views are worth knowing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The birth of a field","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1527],"class_list":["post-223037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223037"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=223037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}