Interdisciplinary Science is Gaining Status - But What's in a Name? (March 10, 2008)

The argument propounding interdisciplinary research in the medical/life sciences has once again gained momentum but in so doing it has also led to confusion.

There is a fundamental difference between an interdisciplinarian and an interdisciplinary group made up of individuals with areas of expertise who synergistically interact.

A recent "Special Report" by Jon Whitfield in Nature sets out the rules in the sidebar "So, you want to be interdisciplinary..."

Here is the advice he garnered:

Interdisciplinary research is not for everyone, and personality is hugely important. At the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, president Geoffrey West is always looking for people who have the right mindset. “You need a person with a passion for a bigger picture of science, who can see beyond boundaries and wants to see where the threads of their ideas might lead in other contexts.” But, he adds, philosophy does not guarantee quality. “There are extraordinarily smart and creative people that don’t care about anything outside their discipline. And there are flaky people who are interested in everything at a very superficial level.”

Here are some tips:

Pay your dues Traditional disciplines give you a strong base from which to launch yourself. “If you’re not well educated in a basic discipline you can’t do interdisciplinary research,” says Kathleen Buckley, director of academic affairs for interdisciplinary science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Listen — and explain “Traditional disciplines have very different cultures, languages, criteria for judging what’s good, and even senses of what science is,” says West. “It’s very easy to look over at another discipline and say ‘that’s a bunch of rubbish’ — and it’s important to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Be humble Meetings of minds don’t work if one party does all the talking, says Marten Scheffer from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “Having alpha-male scientists at interdisciplinary institutes is a risk,” he says. “If you have one or two very dominant people it can destroy openness.”

Be patient Sean Eddy of Janelia Farm in Virginia started his research career as a developmental neurobiologist. He’s now a computational biologist, but it’s taken him until his early 40s to learn the requisite computer science, maths and statistics. “It was slow and painful,” he says. “It’s only just now that I feel I’m trained enough across three or four fields that I can get something done.”

Be brave Exploring new ground is risky, says Janelia Farm director Gerald Rubin. “This isn’t a place for every scientist. You need a large amount of self-confidence and the willingness to take risks. We say: ‘We’re going to bet $10 million, and you’re going to bet your career’.”

Ultimately it's the quality and appropriateness of the expertise individuals bring to the problems requiring interdisciplinary approaches that determine the degree of achievement.

When George Beadle (trained as a maize geneticist) determined to use Neurospora crassa to test the concept of the one-gene-one-enzyme theory he searched for an organic chemist to join him and the dynamic duo of Beadle and Tatum was the result.

Currently arguments are thrown up that interdisciplinary research can be difficult to fund and difficult to publish. But that's getting to be less true.

So, for example the Public Library of Science group of journals are gaining an increasing presence and they have avowed a policy that: "We will be expanding our publishing operation by launching new journals in more specialized areas of biology and medicine, as well as in other disciplines. We hope that at the same time other organizations will be launching open access journals or converting their present journals to the open access model, and we will be happy to work with any organizations who are interested in doing this."

As for resources, the so-called boutique institutions are growing in number, and modern IT allows much readier interaction between institutions and institutional departments. Furthermore, increasing pressure is being brought on national funding councils to look more favourably on interdisciplinary grant applications.

On the other hand interdisciplinary research is not a useful cloak for incompetence.