九层之台,起于累土——从化学生物学成长浅析基金支持对交叉学科的引领作用

A nine-storey tower rises from a heap of earth——an overview of the leading role of funding support for interdisciplines through the growth of chemical biology

化学生物学是化学与生物学、医学等高度交叉的新兴学科. 20世纪末开始,传统学科间的深度融合已经成为科学发展的必然,化学生物学的出现顺应了这种趋势,为生命过程研究带来新的视角,为化学带来新的挑战和机遇.尽管我国化学生物学研究起步略晚于欧美,但是在学科建设过程中得到国家各个层面的关注和支持,发展势头迅猛. 2002年国家自然科学基金委员会在化学科学部依托有机化学学科设立化学生物学学科管理岗位,2016年成立独立学科评审组,并于2017年开始化学生物学项目独立评审.目前,我国化学生物学研究已经形成方向齐全、特色鲜明、水平较高的良好态势,并且拥有一只活跃在国际前沿的年轻的研究队伍.本文回顾了化学生物学学科的成长之路,以及国家基金的前瞻性支持对交叉学科发展的重要引领作用.

Chemical biology is a new interdiscipline involving chemistry, biology and health sciences. With the development of natural sciences, the deep fusion of traditional subjects has proved to be the inevitable result since the end of the 20 th century. Thus, the emergence of chemical biology followed the tendency, which brings new insight to research of life processes and new challenge and opportunity to chemical sciences. The development of chemical biology research in China is later than that in Europe and America. However, the establishment of the discipline has been strongly supported and promoted by different departments of China and has made great progress at high speed. The chemical biology discipline management position was placed in the department of chemical sciences of National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC) under the organic chemistry division in 2002. The academic committee of chemical biology division was organized in 2016 and independently assessed research proposals in 2017. Now chemical biology research in China is fully distributed in different fields with distinctive features and a high level, attracting a large number of active young scientists at the research frontier. Reminding the progress route of chemical biology, the national funding support plays a very important leading role.