It is my privilege to serve as Guest Editor of this Focus Issue of BioEssays which was written during a year of many challenges—a pandemic that has changed every facet of human life, major transformation of political systems, a climate crisis that threatens the wellbeing of our planet itself, and a world-wide demand for social justice that pushes against the inertia of age-old socio-economic hierarchies. From all this, it is clear now that our environment is important, and while this may seem an obvious statement, the past several decades of human scientific effort have not given environmental determinants of health their due—our investment in genetics has far outweighed that in environmental health sciences, for example. However, the tide is turning, and the articles that are included in this issue exemplify that the future will be a ‘‘multi-omic’’ amalgamation of scientific effort that does not assign privilege to any one field but does recognize that a holistic study of the environment is a necessary component of all efforts to understand health and disease.

Unlike our base genomic code, the environment is not finite, and no boundary can be placed around it. For this reason, Environmental Health as a field is also not easily defined, but there is a general agreement that it focuses on the interaction of human physiology with physical, chemical, biological and social factors. What is often not discussed in formal definitions of Environmental Health is that the interactions between the environment and human physiology operate across multiple levels and scales. This then gives way to a complexity that cannot be resolved by reductionist thinking. However, reductionism and structuralism have plagued environmental health sciences as much as any other field giving rise to fragmented studies on individual environmental factors that cannot be combined into a coherent model. To address this problem, a recent conjecture, to which I was a contributor, proposed that complex systems cannot interact directly or exist in isolation.^[1] Titled, the Biodynamic Interface Conjecture, it postulates the existence of an operationally independent interface that connects the environment and human health. The carefully curated articles in this issue further support this to show how the environment and our physiology are indeed complex interacting systems, and the connections that we form with various environmental factors cannot be resolved by reducing them to simple correlations.

Thoughtful pieces included in this issue connect large-scale exposures such as air pollution, bushfires that spanned millions of acres, and persistent use of pesticides to complex health problems such as cardiovascular disease and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (10.1002/bies.2100046, 10.1002/bies.2000254, and 10.1002/bies.2000307). Morris and colleagues show that these global events are linked to molecular pathways impacting neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and mitochondrial function (10.1002/bies.2000288). What will resonate with every reader are the words of Wolhuter and colleagues, “[will this] convince us to change our ways?” In a manner, the answer to that is exemplified by the work of Ainsworth et al. who provide a path to rescue the coral reef, another victim of the climate crisis, through greater knowledge-sharing (10.1002/bies.2100048).

The environment is not all that is contained around us but also that what is within us. An oft ignored reality is that for the microbiome, we humans are their environment. Adler and colleagues use a novel tool, also employed by two other authors, to argue that environmental influences are active as early as fetal development to impact microbial trajectories in childhood ultimately leading to ill health (10.1002/bies.2000314). Keeping with this theme, Luthra-Guptasarma and Guptasarma make an elegant case for the role of diet-gut microbiome link as a determinant of inflammation in severe COVID-19 (10.1002/bies.2000211).

The temporally dynamic nature of our ever-changing environment is another feature that distinguishes it from our genome. But how do we measure what environmental influences occurred in the past? Smith et al., Broberg et al., and Lupo et al., use two novel methods that can help scientists travel back in time and characterize the environmental exposures during our earliest development. Deciduous teeth, which commence development prenatally, and neonatal dry blood spots that are collected at birth and archived the world over, can be analyzed in laboratories with mass spectrometry and other methods to obtain thousands of molecular markers of both the environmental exposures and our biological response to those exposures (10.1002/bies.2100030, 10.1002/bies.2000299, and 10.1002/bies.2000298). Examples of using these tools to study cardiovascular disease, pediatric cancer, and biological rhythms are provided.

At the level of organizations, Bölte and colleagues provide an elegant example of how a polarizing debate between a biomedical versus a neurodiversity paradigm in the study of neurodevelopmental disorders, can be resolved by embracing the views of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (10.1002/bies.2000254). Staying at that level, Dahm and colleagues (10.1002/bies.2100107) provide a thought-provoking opinion piece on how research institutions can foster scientific breakthroughs. They argue for a persistently dynamic innovative researcher and these words from their article resonated strongly with me—“we always have the opportunity to re-create ourselves, what we do and how we do it”.

It is my hope that the articles in this collection will, at least in a small way, assist the readers to re-create their views and how they will incorporate the environment in their studies.

我有幸担任本期BioEssays焦点问题的客座编辑这是在充满挑战的一年中写成的——一场改变了人类生活方方面面的大流行病、政治制度的重大变革、威胁到我们星球自身福祉的气候危机以及推动社会正义的全球需求反对古老的社会经济等级制度的惯性。综上所述，现在很明显我们的环境很重要，虽然这似乎是一个显而易见的说法，但过去几十年的人类科学努力并没有给予健康的环境决定因素应有的重视——我们在遗传学上的投资远远超过了例如，环境健康科学。然而，形势正在逆转，

与我们的基础基因组代码不同，环境不是有限的，也不能在其周围放置边界。出于这个原因，环境健康作为一个领域也不容易定义，但人们普遍认为它侧重于人类生理学与物理、化学、生物和社会因素的相互作用。在环境健康的正式定义中通常没有讨论的是环境与人类生理之间的相互作用跨越多个层次和尺度。然后，这让位于还原论思维无法解决的复杂性。然而，还原论和结构主义像任何其他领域一样困扰着环境健康科学，导致对个别环境因素的零碎研究无法组合成一个连贯的模型。为了解决这个问题，复杂的系统不能直接相互作用或孤立存在。^{[ 1 ]}标题为“生物动力学界面猜想”，它假设存在连接环境和人类健康的操作上独立的界面。本期精心策划的文章进一步支持这一点，以表明环境和我们的生理机能确实是复杂的相互作用系统，我们与各种环境因素形成的联系无法通过将它们简化为简单的相关性来解决。

本期中包含的一些深思熟虑的文章将空气污染、占地数百万英亩的丛林大火以及持续使用杀虫剂等大规模暴露与心血管疾病和神经发育障碍等复杂的健康问题联系起来，包括自闭症谱系障碍 (10.1002/bies.2100046 、10.1002/bies.2000254 和 10.1002/bies.2000307）。Morris 及其同事表明，这些全球性事件与影响神经炎症、氧化应激和线粒体功能的分子通路有关 (10.1002/bies.2000288)。Wolhuter 及其同事的话会引起每位读者的共鸣，“[这会] 说服我们改变我们的方式吗？” 在某种程度上，Ainsworth 等人的工作证明了这个问题的答案。他们提供了一条拯救珊瑚礁的途径，珊瑚礁是气候危机的另一个受害者，

环境不仅仅是我们周围所包含的一切，还包括我们内部的一切。一个经常被忽视的现实是，对于微生物组来说，我们人类就是它们的环境。Adler 及其同事使用了另两位作者使用的一种新工具，认为环境影响早在胎儿发育时就活跃，以影响儿童时期的微生物轨迹，最终导致健康不佳 (10.1002/bies.2000314)。与这个主题保持一致，Luthra-Guptasarma 和 Guptasarma 为饮食-肠道微生物组链接作为严重 COVID-19 炎症的决定因素的作用提供了一个优雅的案例 (10.1002/bies.2000211)。

我们不断变化的环境的时间动态特性是另一个区别于我们基因组的特征。但是我们如何衡量过去发生的环境影响呢？Smith 等人、Broberg 等人和 Lupo 等人使用了两种新方法，可以帮助科学家回到过去，并在我们最早的发展过程中表征环境暴露。在产前开始发育的乳牙，以及出生时收集并在世界各地存档的新生儿干血斑，可以在实验室中使用质谱和其他方法进行分析，以获得环境暴露和我们的生物反应的数千种分子标记对这些风险敞口（10.1002/bies.2100030、10.1002/bies.2000299 和 10.1002/bies.2000298）。使用这些工具研究心血管疾病的例子，

在组织层面，Bölte 及其同事提供了一个优雅的例子，说明如何通过采纳国际功能障碍和健康分类 (10.1002) 的观点来解决神经发育障碍研究中生物医学与神经多样性范式之间的两极分化争论/bies.2000254）。Dahm 及其同事 (10.1002/bies.2100107) 保持在这一水平，就研究机构如何促进科学突破提供了发人深省的观点。他们主张要有一个持续活跃的创新研究人员，他们文章中的这些话引起了我的强烈共鸣——“我们总是有机会重新创造自己，我们做什么以及我们如何做”。

我希望本集中的文章至少能在一定程度上帮助读者重新创造他们的观点以及他们如何将环境融入他们的研究中。