The life sciences are starting a third revolution. Remember these three key words

For the third life science revolution, Tang Chao gave three key words: "technological progress", "interdisciplinary integration", "quantification of life science".

He explained that technological progress refers to the rapid development of new technologies, such as imaging technology, gene editing technology, stem cell technology, brain-computer interface technology and so on.

Regarding the "interdisciplinary integration", Tang Chao said that the discipline is artificially defined, not defined by nature. In the process of studying nature, as the research is refined, it is divided into disciplines, but such classification has great limitations. For complex phenomena in the field of life science, one discipline is far from enough, and many new technologies need to integrate physics, chemistry, including information science. "The fact that different disciplines are bringing something new into the life sciences is critical, and it's a big sign of the third life sciences." He also emphasized that interdisciplinary convergence, while driving the third life science revolution, will also affect other disciplines, bringing new physics, mathematics, computer science, and so on. Therefore, this revolution is not only a revolution of a single discipline, but also a revolution of interdisciplinary integration.

As for the third key word - "quantification", Tang Chao said that today in the field of life, unlike physics and chemistry, equations have been discovered and summarized. "Quantification" is the "universal quantitative law", which is to understand the principles of living systems and change to quantitative and predictable science.

Ouyang Qi and Li Dong agree with these three key words. Ouyang Qi said that integration may be the future trend. "The future of science may be focused on problem solving, rather than this being a problem of physics, this being a problem of astronomy or mathematics, [but] becoming more and more integrated."

The integration of disciplines means the integration of knowledge, and the integration of knowledge cannot be separated from talents. Li Dong stressed that the third life science revolution, which is mainly characterized by interdisciplinary science, poses a great challenge to future students, and also poses a great challenge to schools to train interdisciplinary talents to meet future needs. As for the cultivation of future talents, he suggested that the first is to be driven by their own interests, have the ability to find problems, not for the sake of crossover, but to be driven by the problems of life science itself, and carry out interdisciplinary research; The second is the construction of learning capacity, the development of a broader science-based interest at university, and the ability to enter into further study in various disciplines.

Ouyang Qi said that the most key of the three keywords is "quantification", there are two ways to describe quantitative, one is similar to the analytical formula, like Newton's second law can explain some phenomena; The other is big data, which trains models with massive amounts of data, such as AlphaGo, which plays chess, and AlphaFold, which predicts proteins. "We are already seeing possibilities and directions for quantitative descriptions of life... [But] until now, there have really only been specific life processes that can be quantitatively described, and that's very rare."

Finally, Li Dong talked about bringing more objective and quantitative descriptions driven by new technologies, then recognizing the laws, and then reverse iteration and reverse engineering after abstract induction. The idea is well accepted within the scientific community, but it is still in its infancy. "I don't think it's easy to say how it will evolve or at what point in time," Li said.