Site: http://www.futurephy.org
Completing the Tree of Life is a grand challenge in science, on the same intellectual scale as investigating the nature of matter or the origin of the universe: it is fundamental to understanding our world, central to human sustainability, and critical as a framework for enabling interdisciplinary discovery. Progress toward this challenge has begun to transform the life sciences by blending biology with computer science and successfully generating large genealogies of thousands -- even millions -- of species. These large trees are now informing many branches of biology, from genomics to ecology, and have great promise for applications in medicine, agriculture, industry, and climate-change mitigation.