WASHINGTON — Like many professionals in a competitive climate of ever-advancing technologies, biologists, engineers and the medical community are now expected to juggle several fields of expertise.
A recent report from the National Research Council emphasizes a need for disparate disciplines to work together – the so-called “new biology” – to advance the U.S. in the “biology revolution” and solve society’s big problems in energy, environment, agriculture and health.
Nashville academics are divided on what it will take to make such an approach succeed.
“If you’re going to take on interdisciplinary research, a student needs to be as conversive in one area as they are in another,” said Robert Grammer, associate dean of the School of Sciences at Belmont University. “They can’t just go broad and shallow – they need to know [several fields], and that takes more training to be efficient in those areas, and more resources and time.”
Grammer compared interdisciplinary research and training to medical school, saying that Belmont makes a point to tell pre-med students that they need to excel in several areas – not just academics – to succeed.
“Fewer people will be successful [at several disciplines] than people who just stay in one traditional discipline, because you’ve got to be clicking on everything,” Grammer said.
A professor at Vanderbilt University said that encouraging students could be the key to their cross-discipline success.
“To me, the issue is getting students to not be afraid to fail and to attack new ideas and new thinking across multiple areas,” said Robert Galloway, professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt.
A House of Representatives subcommittee met Tuesday (June 29) to discuss the implications of “New Biology in the 21st Century,” the report that came out in September of 2009 but had yet to be discussed on Capitol Hill.
“Research happening at the intersection of the biological sciences, the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics has the potential to help solve numerous important problems,” said the subcommittes’s chairman, Rep. Daniel Lipinski,D-Ill.
The subcommittee and witnesses in Washington all agreed that students – who are the future of biology as much as this new thinking is – need to be flexible in their education and training, and begin integrating various disciplines early on.
“I’m hopeful that not only will we not require more time for training, but we’ll require less,” said Keith Yamamoto from the University of California, San Francisco and chair of the National Academy of Science’s board on life sciences. He added biology students should engage in a “broader education from the outset” to be well-versed in different fields.
The subcommittee, as well as Vanderbilt’s Galloway, both emphasize that good teamwork is also necessary for the new biology.
“Science in general is about increasing knowledge, engineering is about finding solutions,” Galloway said. “Together they can address all of these problems. But it will take time and long-term support with culture change by everybody.”