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Abstract
On a traditional university campus, it would be hard to imagine a cancer biologist and a chemical engineer teaming up to do vaccine research. Or a civil engineer collaborating with a geologist to study the effects of coral reefs on world climate change. Or medical school professors teaching medicine to biology graduate students. But these projects and more than a dozen others are under way at Stanford University, thanks to an ambitious, well-funded interdisciplinary initiative called Bio-X.
| Bio-X is interdisciplinary and well funded. |
The program reflects a growing recognition that cutting-edge research in the post-genomic age requires expertise from more than one field, including many that have not worked together previously. The official goal of Bio-X is to promote bioscience research and education across disciplines. But unofficially, Bio-X and similar ventures across the United States have even more profound ambitions - to change not only the face of biomedicine but also academia.
"The world is fully integrated," said Richard Zare, Bio-X cofounder and Stanford chemistry professor. "Information is being received in an integrated form. And then the questions go to people at universities who disintegrate them into different departments. It's a structure that has been built in by now hundreds of years of successful operation."
| Interdisciplinary programs are not new. |
Interdisciplinary programs, of course, are not new; campuses everywhere have centers devoted to studying scientific, social, and intellectual problems across departmental boundaries. Nor was Stanford the first to embrace bold cross-fertilization in bioscience. "Interdisciplinary" has become the buzzword of academic science and, apparently, a selling point in faculty recruitment and retention. Bio-X was conceived when two prominent Stanford professors - Nobel laureate and physicist Steve Chu and biochemist James Spudich - were being wooed to develop similar initiatives at other universities.
Top schools are now competing to build not only the best programs but also the fanciest monuments to interdisciplinary work. These efforts have resulted in vast research centers with atriums, removable walls, expansive meeting rooms, and even cafeterias for serendipitous encounters.
| There's magic in talking to people in the hall. |
"Despite the advances of the Internet and connectivity, there's something magic about meeting people in the hall and talking to them," said Harvey Cohen, Stanford professor of pediatrics and Bio-X leader.
The University of Chicago plans to break ground later this year on a $180 million, 420,000-square-foot building - the largest, most expensive in the school's history. The University of California at Berkeley has launched a half-billion-dollar Health Sciences Initiative, which will involve $300 million in new facilities and as many as 400 researchers from disparate disciplines, including biology, mathematics, public health, engineering, and psychology. Harvard and Princeton, as well, have major interdisciplinary ventures and construction plans. Stanford is building the 225,000-square-foot James H. Clark Center to house Bio-X between the computer science and chemistry buildings and the medical school.
Each one of these universities claims its initiative is the one to beat. Stanford asserts two key advantages: the participation of three strong schools – Humanities and Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine - on a single campus; and a culture that values interdisciplinary research. Stanford's program also has substantial funding.
| The "X" signifies the unknown. |
Bio-X was conceived in 1998 by an eclectic group of professors, including Spudich and Chu (the "X" was meant to signify the unknown). In late 1999, the program received $150 million, at that time the largest single gift in Stanford history, from Jim Clark, a former Stanford engineering professor who made his fortune as founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. In announcing the donation, Clark said that crossing traditional boundaries had greatly contributed to his success. Bio-X later received an additional $60 million from an anonymous donor.
To bring life to Bio-X even before the Clark Center is complete, the program has awarded grants. In May 2000, the Bio-X Core Facilities Committee - one of six committees made up of 42 faculty and staff - awarded $7 million to 17 projects seeking to build or upgrade bioresearch labs on campus. Among the new facilities are the Tissue Bank, a central lab for obtaining, storing, and experimenting on animal and human tissue; and the Cognitive Neuroscience Facility, a $1 million center for analyzing brain function and thought using computational neuroimaging, eye-tracking equipment, and other new technologies.
| Some unlikely professors have teamed up. |
In October 2000, the Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program Committee, having received 90 applications, awarded approximately $3 million in seed grants to 19 research and educational projects. Money went to some novel proposals and unlikely teams. James Swartz, a professor of chemical engineering, and Ronald Levy, a cancer biologist, will work on developing a method to rapidly synthesize patient-specific vaccines to treat B cell lymphoma. The goal: a cost-effective vaccine that can be produced in a week. Jeffrey Koseff, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Robert Dunbar, a professor of geological and environmental sciences, are studying a coral reef system in the Red Sea to assess its effect on the total carbon balance, and, by extension, global warming. Another grant went to a team examining the production of organic material in reef ecosystems.
Two medical school faculty members, Jane Parnes and Elizabeth Mellins, received funds to develop an introductory course in medicine for biomedical graduate students. Faculty from the Stanford Learning Lab and the School of Education are participating in the course, which began this spring.
| Money motivates people to think across disciplines. |
Of course, doling out grants - not to mention erecting massive complexes - always sparks controversy on campuses. One doesn't hear much philosophical objection to the interdisciplinary push. But at Stanford and everywhere else, there is tension over the details. "If you think it's hard to get cooperation between departments, understand that we're talking about cooperation between different schools," Zare said.
| What about the politics? |
Who gets how much space and money? What happens to departments whose stars move their labs down the street? Is the new space counted as part of the department – or, in other words, is the department growing or shrinking?
At Chicago, great minds have devoted many hours to puzzling over matters of prestige and power. "Seems like we've been through a million of them," said Donald Levy, a chemistry professor involved in the design and planning of the giant new interdisplinary research building. Even the size of offices became a huge, cross-cultural issue - chemists wanted one thing, biologists another. "I'm told that the physical sciences traditionally have bigger offices than the biological sciences," Levy said. "You can't have a building with two different size offices. We met somewhere in the middle."
| Tenure requirements may need to be reexamined. |
More significantly, the new collaborative zeal could force a reexamination of promotion and tenure. At Stanford Medical School, for example, faculty members up for tenure traditionally have had to demonstrate that their published work was written independently of collaborators and mentors. "It's always been, 'What have you done?' as opposed to 'What have you contributed to?'" said Cohen. If the school wants to encourage innovative collaboration over the creation of ever-more specialized fiefdoms, "it does require thinking a little differently about how we reward achievement," according to Cohen.
Leaders of Bio-X know they're stepping on sacred ground here, and they're treading softly. They're quick to say they are not out to kill departments. "You can't have a strong interdisciplinary program without building it on strong disciplines," Zare said. "So the first corollary is that departments are here to stay." His second corollary: interdisciplinary programs must be "structured as a win-win. People must perceive these as not robbing the departments."
Bio-X is negotiating with the three participating schools to determine what incentives would lead each to view interdisciplinary collaboration as a gain - not a loss - in resources, connections, money, and influence.
| Bio-X challenges traditional academia. |
But political delicacies aside, Bio-X and its counterparts are striving to be more than grant programs, new buildings, or the latest trendy center on their campus. And those ambitions pose a challenge to the traditions and orthodoxies of academia.
"It's a new paradigm," Zare said. "It's a completely new way for faculty to interact and do research."
Fran Smith is a freelance writer and editor.
Cary Barnhard grew up in New Jersey, where his senior class voted him "most unique." He maintains that honor is a polite way of being voted "most likely to need therapy." After a few misadventures in the music industry, he started pretending to be a graphic artist. Eventually it became the truth.
Berkeley Puts All Its Eggs in Two Baskets, Interdisciplinary Research: From Belief to Reality, NIH Urged to Fund Centers to Merge Computing and Biology, and Education for a Biocomplex Future - several recent articles from Science magazine examine the growing interdisciplinary nature of science. Paid subscription required for access.
An Interview with Rita Colwell, Biocomplexity: A New Science for Survival?, Multidisciplinary Centers Take Up Challenges, and Broader Ph.D. Training Can Benefit Science and Society - several recent articles from The Scientist also focus on this issue.
Interdisciplinary Science - a rebroadcast of a popular Science Friday.
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