https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3159-7394
This fall marks 2 years since I was given the honor of serving on the Editorial Board of PNAS Nexus, first as Deputy Editor and a few months later as Editor-in-Chief. I would like to share my perspective on the remarkable growth of the journal and on its contributions in shaping the increasingly overarching domain of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research, discovery, and innovation. Since September 2021, we have received more than 3,500 submissions and are experiencing a 51% growth in submissions, as of August 2024. And in that time, we have published over 1,000 articles covering a wide breadth of disciplines. To handle the breadth and volume of submissions, we have expanded our Editorial Board to over 120 experts who volunteer their time and expertise to evaluate and advise on submissions.
Yannis C. Yortsos
I also wish to reflect, with a special focus on sustainability, on how the grand challenges of our times demand for their solution the accelerating convergence of such approaches.
In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering articulated 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, aimed at identifying key issues worth attracting the attention of scientists, technologists, and engineers. While one might argue about the completeness of that set of challenges, their fundamental characteristic is that they fit into four buckets of endeavor, specifically, sustainability, health, security, and enriching life (or as the late visionary National Academy of Engineering President Chuck Vest used to call “the joy of life,” following which he would make the whimsical remark, “Engineers working on the joy of life?!”). These four buckets were mapped to the thematic components of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, now not only applicable to an individual, but also to society and the planet at large. With this mindset, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that followed in 2015 can also be thought of as falling into the same four buckets, with an additional emphasis on society-oriented, life-enriching solutions. Aspirational goals of this kind have also been articulated in diverse fields of science and medicine.
Viewed through this lens, the papers attracted for publication in PNAS Nexus fall nicely in these four broad categories. I must emphasize that these also include advances in scientific and technological discovery, naturally captured in the enriching life bucket. This would not be surprising for a journal that aims to promote multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary work (which we can collectively denote as hyphenated-disciplinary). Indeed, the extraordinary advances in technology, and more specifically in advanced computing, and its manifestations as artificial intelligence, machine learning, or related techniques, have increasingly made the flourishing of any new idea, whether in basic discovery or in a grand-challenge-like endeavor, the result of such hyphenated-disciplinary approaches. The recent Nobel Prize awards in Physics and Chemistry are a resounding demonstration. Furthermore, the seemingly faster-than-exponential growth of today's technologies is likely to accelerate convergence in all the topics of interest that fit the previously mentioned Maslow hierarchy, as it applies not only to the individual, but also to its societal extension and interpretation. And without a doubt, it will additionally couple items across the four buckets with each other in a meta-manifestation of the hyphenated disciplinarity.
This gives me a chance to share some views on sustainability, in the sense that we typically refer to the subject, as one with immense aspects of meta- and hyphenated disciplinarity, as will be shown subsequently. I am prompted to share these views, as this past summer, I was given the opportunity to organize or participate in panels on this subject, one of which took place in Greece. It is fascinating to look at how the term sustainability is expressed in Greek and in English, respectively. Consider: if one asks Google to translate sustainability into Greek, the answer obtained is βιωσιμοτητα (“viosimótita”), which means “viability.” Indeed, this word effectively parallels its meaning in English. However, the majority of my Greek science and engineering colleagues use a different term for sustainability, namely αειφορια (“uh-e-foria”), which properly translates into “thriving and prosperity” (with the prefix αει indicating forever). And in a fascinating lack of forward-backward equivalence, the English translation of the Greek word αειφορια is “sustainability,” the Greek translation of which is the different word βιωσιμοτητα! What gives?
I suggest that we break this asymmetry by henceforth endowing what in English we call sustainability—which to some evokes a sense of maintaining, restraints, or even worse, scarcity and stagnation—with the different and forward-looking attributes of thriving and prosperity, all within the context of a healthy planet, as is indeed inherent in αειφορια. I will leave it to the linguists to tell us how this can be accomplished!
I chose sustainability to further highlight the breadth of disciplines it involves. Indeed, in a panel this summer I was asked to present my thoughts on a sustainability education curriculum. Now, assuming that the desired outcome of such a curriculum should be αειφορια, namely thriving and prosperity, the question ultimately becomes one on the health of the planet, which will, in turn, connect to security and enriching life, not unlike the UN SDGs. So, in a fascinating meta-disciplinary way, the bucket of sustainability cannot be explored without its intricate connections to its other three buckets (as in communicating vessels)!
Now, if we compare the health of the planet with that of an individual, the elements of a sustainability curriculum are immediately apparent. First, we will need one or more fundamental science pillars that help us understand how the planet, its climate, and many of its other characteristics work. This would surely include climate, earth, and health sciences. Biology would be its science counterpart in a curriculum for the health of an individual. Next, we will need an understanding of technologies that regulate a healthy planetary state, a form of homeostasis, so to speak, for example, in energy, water, materials, and an array of other entities. Now, the parallel of medical technologies for the health of an individual comes to mind. And finally, we will need an understanding of thriving and prosperity for all humanity, perhaps paralleling the UN SDGs or a more updated version of the same. Now, the parallel of wellness and longevity for the health of an individual comes to mind.
I am not a sustainability (read αειφορια[!]) expert, so my suggestions are likely incomplete and not necessarily novel. Nonetheless, I present them in this editorial, as they vividly illustrate the extraordinary and hyphenated-disciplinary coupling among disciplines and, following my previous classification, its meta-version. Indeed, if we adopt the four-bucket analogy as a way of thinking about the classification of important, timely, and crucial problems in science, engineering, and medicine, it becomes clear that the boundaries among these disciplines are increasingly permeable in all directions. This inevitable result of the fact that technology and humanity are intertwined as never before results in increasingly converging, hyphenated-disciplinary approaches to the solution of grand challenge-like problems. Recognizing this, we cherish the existence of a welcoming forum for disseminating such work, like PNAS Nexus, to help promote constant αειφορια (thriving and prosperity) in our scientific and technological endeavors.
Author notes
Competing Interest: The author declares no competing interest.
