Ciencias Interdisciplinarias

“Antedisciplinary” Science
Sean R Eddy
Sean R. Eddy is at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States of America. E-mail: eddy@genetics.wustl.edu
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“The scale and complexity of today'sbiomedical research problems demand that scientists move beyond the confines of their individual disciplines and explore new organizational models for team science. Advances in molecular imaging, for example, require collaborations among diverse groups—radiologists, cell biologists, physicists, and computer programmers.” —National Institutes of Health Roadmap Initiative [1]
Reading this made me a littledepressed. For starters, the phrase “organizational models for team science” makes me imagine a factory floor of scientists toiling away on their next 100-author paper under the watchful gaze of their National Institutes of Health program officers, like some scene from Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. It's also depressing to read that the National Institutes of Health thinks that science has becometoo hard for individual humans to cope with, and that it will take the hive mind of an interdisciplinary “research team of the future” to make progress. But what's most depressing comes from purely selfish reasons: if groundbreaking science really requires assembling teams of people with proper credentials from different disciplines, then I have made some very bad career moves.
I've been acomputational biologist for about 15 years now. We're still not quite sure what “computational biology” means, but we seem to agree that it's an interdisciplinary field, requiring skills in computer science, molecular biology, statistics, mathematics, and more. I'm not qualified in any of these fields. I'm certainly not a card-carrying software developer, computer scientist, or mathematician, though Ispend most of my time writing software, developing algorithms, and deriving equations. I do have formal training in molecular biology, but that was 15 years ago, and I'm sure my union card has expired. For one thing, they all seem to be using these clever, expensive kits now in my wet lab, whereas I made most of my own buffers (after walking to the lab six miles in the snow, barefoot).
If Ithought I was the only person who abandoned disciplinary training to take up a new area of science, after reading about the “research teams of the future,” I might slink away and find something else to do before the future arrives. But I don't think I'm alone. I was recently at a meeting where people started discussing these interdisciplinary “research teams of the future,” and Howard Berg, who had justgiven a wonderful chalk talk about bacterial chemotaxis, was sitting behind me. I heard him mutter that he wondered how a misfit like him was going to fit into this new world order. Well, he's doomed. He's successfully applied physical, mathematical, and biological approaches to an important problem without enlisting an interdisciplinary team of properly qualified physicists, mathematicians, andbiologists. As he recently wrote, perhaps he'll have to start collaborating with himself [2].
I wonder if it's the success of the Human Genome Project that led us to this. The scale of the genome project required “big science” and large teams. The genome project also fueled the explosive growth of the highly successful field of computational biology. Did the ideas of interdisciplinary science andlarge teams become inappropriately intertwined? Certainly, achieving the goals of the Human Genome Project required engineers, physicists, and computer scientists. It would be silly to argue against large interdisciplinary teams where a mammoth technical goal can be clearly defined. But when I think of new fields in science that have been opened, I don't think of interdisciplinary teams...