Perspectives‘‘ Antedisciplinary’’ ScienceSean R. Eddy‘‘ The scale and complexity of today’s biomedical research problemsdemand that scientists move beyond the confines of their individualdisciplines and explore new organizational models for team science.Advances in molecular imaging, for example, require collaborationsamong diverse groups—radiologists, cell biologists, physicists, andcomputer programmers.’’ —National Institutes of Health RoadmapInitiative [1]Reading this made me a little depressed. For starters,the phrase ‘‘ organizational models for team science’’makes me imagine a factory floor of scientists toilingaway on their next 100-author paper under the watchful gazeof their National Institutes of Health program officers, likesome scene from Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil. It’s alsodepressing to read that the National Institutes of Healththinks that science has become too hard for individualhumans to cope with, and that it will take the hive mind of aninterdisciplinary ‘‘ research team of the future’’ to makeprogress. But what’s most depressing comes from purelyselfish reasons: if groundbreaking science really requiresassembling teams of people with proper credentials fromdifferent disciplines, then I have made some very bad careermoves.I’ve been a computational 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 interdisciplinaryfield, requiring skills in computer science, molecular biology,statistics, mathematics, and more. I’m not qualified in any ofthese fields. I’m certainly not a card-carrying softwaredeveloper, computer scientist, or mathematician, though Ispend most of my time writing software, developingalgorithms, and deriving equations. I do have formal trainingin molecular biology, but that was 15 years ago, and I’m suremy union card has expired. For one thing, they all seem to beusing these clever, expensive kits now in my wet lab, whereas Imade most of my own buffers (after walking to the lab sixmiles in the snow, barefoot).If I thought I was the only person who abandoneddisciplinary training to take up a new area of science, afterreading about the ‘‘ research teams of the future,’’ I mightslink away and find something else to do before the futurearrives. But I don’t think I’m alone. I was recently at a meetingwhere people started discussing these interdisciplinary‘‘ research teams of the future,’’ and Howard Berg, who hadjust given a wonderful chalk talk about bacterial chemotaxis,was sitting behind me. I heard him mutter that he wonderedhow a misfit like him was going to fit into this new worldorder. Well, he’s doomed. He’s successfully applied physical,mathematical, and biological approaches to an importantproblem without enlisting an interdisciplinary team ofproperly qualified physicists, mathematicians, and biologists.As he recently wrote, perhaps he’ll have to start collaboratingwith himself [2].I wonder if it’s the success of the Human Genome Projectthat led us to this. The scale of the genome project required‘‘ big science’’ and large teams. The genome project alsofueled the explosive growth of the highly successful field ofcomputational biology. Did the ideas of interdisciplinaryscience and large teams become inappropriately intertwined?Certainly, achieving the goals of the Human Genome Projectrequired engineers, physicists, and computer scientists. Itwould be silly to argue against large interdisciplinary teamswhere a mammoth technical goal can be clearly defined. Butwhen I think of new fields in science that have been opened, Idon’t think of interdisciplinary teams combining existing skillsto solve a defined problem—I think of single interdisciplinarypeople inventing new ways to look at the world.Focusing on interdisciplinary teams instead of interdisci-plinary people reinforces standard disciplinary boundariesrather than breaking them down. An interdisciplinary team isa committee in which members identify themselves as anexpert in something else besides the actual scientific problemat hand, and abdicate responsibility for the majority of thework because it’s not their field. Expecting a team ofdisciplinary scientists to develop a new field is like sending ateam of monolingual diplomats to the United Nations.Progress is driven by new scientific questions, whichdemand new ways of thinking. You want to go where aquestion takes you, not where your training left you. We maynot have a single clarion call to arms like Schro¨dinger’s Whatis Life? driving physicists into biology right now, as in thebeginnings of molecular biology. But we do have powerfulnew technologies to harness (computational biology), newlyrevitalized approaches to old problems (systems biology), andnew areas altogether (synthetic biology). New disciplineseventually self-organize around new problems and ap-proaches, creating a new shared culture. This shared culturecoalesces into the next essential training regimen for the nextgeneration of scientists, and with luck, some of these peoplewill overcome their training to open up more new fields ofinquiry. Interdisciplinary science is just the embryonic stageof a new discipline. To value interdisciplinary science for itsown sake is to value history over progress—that is, to valuepeople’s past training more than their current work.Don’t get me wrong. Certainly experience does affect howproblems are approached, and it’s synergistic to bringtogether people with different ideas. It’s just a question ofemphasis. In a marriage, previous experience affects what isbrought to the partnership; but dwelling too much on priorCitation: Eddy SR (2005) ‘‘ Antedisciplinary’’ science. PLoS Comp Biol 1(1): e6.Copyright: Ó 2005 Sean R. Eddy. This is an open- access article distributed underthe terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricteduse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work isproperly cited.Sean R. Eddy is at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department ofGenetics at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, Missouri,United States of America. E-mail: [email protected]: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010006PLoS Computational Biology | www.ploscompbiol.org June 2005 | Volume 1 | Issue 1 | e60003experience causes the commitment to the current
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