The scope and scale of the life sciences (‘Nature’s envelope’)

The extension of biology with a more data-centric component offers new opportunities for discovery. To enable investigations that rely on third-party data, the infrastructure that retains data and allows their re-use should, ideally, enable transactions that relate to any and all biological processes. The assembly of such a service-oriented and enabling infrastructure is challenging. Part of the challenge is to factor in the scope and scale of biological processes. From this foundation can emerge an estimate of the number of discipline-specific centres which will gather data in their given area of interest and prepare them for a path that will lead to trusted, persistent data repositories which will make fit-for-purpose data available for re-use. A simple model is presented for the scope and scale of life sciences that includes all of the processes conducted by or caused by any and all organisms. It is depicted on a grid, the axes of which are (x) the durations of the processes and (y) the sizes of participants involved. Both axes are presented in log 10 scales, and the grid is divided into decadal blocks with ten fold increments of time and size. Processes range in duration from 10 -17 seconds to 3.5 billion years or more, and the sizes of participants range from 10 -15  to 1.3 10 7 metres. Examples are given to illustrate the diversity of biological processes and their often inexact character. About half of the blocks within the grid do not contain known processes. The blocks that include biological processes amount to ‘Nature’s envelope’, a valuable rhetorical device onto which subdisciplines can be mapped, and from which can be derived some key requirements for a comprehensive data infrastructure.