What branch of biology studies the environment to advance medicine?
This sort of touches on what my current grad research is – I’m a Masters student studying H5N1 (avian flu) from an Ecosystem Approach to Health. I’m currently living and working in Vietnam for a research institute while collecting research that is partially funded by the WHO and Ministry of Health here. I’m very lucky, since there are not many people doing what I do! Ecosystem Approach to Health a new and emerging field, but it’s growing. It’s inter-disciplinary/ team-based/multi-variable/mix of quantitative and qualitative tools/participatory action research. Many of the practitioners (like me) are researchers in more traditional fields (epidemiologists, veterinarians, family doctors, ecologists, etc.) who are tired of the narrow viewpoint their discipline brings to the table and want to branch out. Last summer I was invited to participate in the first-ever short course in Canada to teach emerging researchers the tools o
There’s a long pipeline between finding weird stuff and a medical advance. There’s much you need to understand about an unusual organism before you can hope to apply anything to medicine. But it is still worthwhile to find them. Unusual microbes have also led to some of our most widely used biotechnology products (for example, Taq polymerase). I don’t think there is a single field that looks for medical advances in lots of biological domains at once. Instead you will find microbiologists and botanists looking for this sort of thing within their own area. Norman Pace’s Lab at University of Colorado–Boulder engages in a environmental microbiology search for interesting new microbes. Their work was featured in the IMAX documentary Amazing Caves, which is a fun movie.
