The inaugural edition of PLOS Computational Biology has an interesting opinion piece by Sean Eddy about interdisciplinary research.
Focusing on interdisciplinary teams instead of interdisciplinary people reinforces standard disciplinary boundaries rather than breaking them down. An interdisciplinary team is a committee in which members identify themselves as an expert in something else besides the actual scientific problem at hand, and abdicate responsibility for the majority of the work because it's not their field. Expecting a team of disciplinary scientists to develop a new field is like sending a team of monolingual diplomats to the United Nations. [...]Perhaps the whole idea of interdisciplinary science is the wrong way to look at what we want to encourage. What we really mean is “antedisciplinary” science—the science that precedes the organization of new disciplines, the Wild West frontier stage that comes before the law arrives. It's apropos that antedisciplinary sounds like “anti-disciplinary.” People who gravitate to the unexplored frontiers tend to be self-selected as people who don't like disciplines—or discipline, for that matter.
Unfortunately, he doesn't paint computer science in a very good light.
Computer science mythologizes the big teams and great computing engines of Bletchley Park cracking the Enigma code as much as we mythologize the Human Genome Project, but computer science rests more on the lasting visions of unique intellectual adventurers like Alan Turing and John von Neumann.
Reading this makes me want to tear my hair out. No, no, no! It's not computer science that mythologizes big teams and big iron. That attitude may be prevalent in a few subfields, and it's unfortunately common in the federal funding agencies, but most of us computer scientists know better. (Right?) The vast majority, if not all, of the intellectual advances in computing over the last 60 years have come from individuals or small teams.
(And wasn't the final assembly of the human genome done by a lone grad student?)
I agree, up to a point; however, as you know those individual adventurers, those Lone Geniuses, were not generally alone: they were part of a larger scientific community, in which currents of vague notions and ideas are constantly circulating. This is not the same as "research by committee",
although often the community is too narrow.
From the existence of such communities comes the frequency of independent discovery or "near misses", like Darwin/Wallace, Einstein/Poincare, or Newton/Leibniz, and likely we all know of examples closer to home. At a certain point, the time is ripe, both with needed "machinery" for solving a problem, and for the understanding of why the problem is interesting.
Oftentimes the Lone Genius idea, the Science Hero, results in winner-take-all attitudes and situations. Why give grants to anyone but Dr. Genius? Everyone else will just fill the literature with boring, derivative work. Why work with anyone but Dr. Genius? Look at how many papers the Genius has co-authored! That idea must be great, after all, it came from the Science Hero. And so on.
And while "research by committee" is not so efficient, it can be great to have another kind of community, at a university or research lab, where you eat lunch with the person down the hall who does something radically different from what you do. You don't necessarily work with them, but they can be consulted, and sometimes you hear at lunch about interesting stuff outside your usual line. Great things can come from that kind of community also.
Posted by: Ken Clarkson | July 13, 2005 at 07:10 AM