Reports of Note

NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Releases its Strategic Prospectus

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health is pleased to share its strategic prospectus, The Contributions of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research to Improving the Health of the Nation: A Prospectus for the Future. The culmination of more than a year of deliberation, the prospectus identifies the most exciting and promising areas of behavioral and social sciences research and OBSSR’s vision for how behavioral research can help solve the most pressing public health challenges faced by our society.

It is now clear that behavior – both individual and collective – is the bridge between biology and society. Indeed, the more we learn about the complexity of causal pathways for the most common preventable chronic diseases and disabilities, especially from the emerging field of the epigenome, the more we see the urgency of investing in understanding the interaction of genes, brain, behavior, and the social and physical environment. Basic and applied behavioral and social sciences research has come of age. Fueled by breakthroughs in informatics and computational mathematics, a new approach involving systems integration, will transform our understanding of the etiology, prevention and treatment of common disease. Traditional biomedical science’s reductionism of linear causality is giving way to a dynamic, non-linear understanding of multi-level and reciprocal influences. The ultimate “causes of the causes” for much of the burden of preventable common diseases lie in the interaction of individual vulnerability with human-created environments. This interaction results in massive population changes in disease incidence and prevalence, often within one or two generations, such as in the case of HIV-AIDS, obesity and type 2 diabetes and tobacco use behavior and its devastating epidemic of disease burden.

To effectively address the most pressing public health issues, we must forge collaborations among scientists from all disciplines-biological, behavioral, social, economic, and public health sciences. The late 20th century bio-medical models and the behavioral-socio-ecological models of public health are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. We are moving from systems biology to systems behavioral and social sciences. This requires more vertical systems integration of disciplines from the molecular and cellular level, to the brain-behavior–interpersonal level to the broad economic, cultural and global level. We look forward to strengthening existing partnerships and forging new collaborations to improve the Nation’s health and well-being.

David B. Abrams, Ph.D.
Director, OBSSR and
Associate Director, NIH Office of the Director (OD)

January 17, 2008