Interdisciplinary Collaborations Are A Scientific And Social Imperative

And Social Imperative We are well past the point at which the knowledge required to enhance the health and well-being of individuals and communities can come solely from lone investigators trying to unlock nature's secrets, or from the offerings of any single discipline. The myth of the solitary scientist in search of truth is a romantic notion whose continued existence serves as a major barrier to progress in bringing the collective weight of the sciences to bear on the problems of humankind. And the idea that all scientific progress takes place within the boundaries of current disciplines is historically invalid and currently counterproductive. But the need for development of sustained collaboration by interdisciplinary groups of active research scientists does not arise only from the urgency of social problems; it is intrinsic to the scientific process itself, and it becomes more acute as the accumulation of scientific knowledge continues. No one person can comprehend the full range of that knowledge; science is a collective rather than an individual possession. Scientific training is, and must remain, specialized; no student could hope to master the content and methods of all the sciences. However, while the attractions of interdisciplinary collaboration are great, the obstacles to such arrangements are even greater. The structures and mechanisms that have evolved for the conduct and support of science militate against intellectual collaboration to some extent within disciplines and, to a much greater degree, among disciplines. The bulk of research is carried out in universities, whose structures and reward systems discourage sustained collaboration across disciplines. The dominant organizational units in universities are discipline-based departments, each of which tends to protect its distinctive turf. The persistent competition for funds and students, the development of separate disciplinary languages, and the serene disinterest in their translation across departmental boundaries are all too familiar. In addition, the principal criteria for decisions on tenure and promotion are the number of publications in refereed journals, the number that show single rather than multiple authorship, and the frequency of citation in scientific journals. The result is to encourage frequent reporting on narrow topics and methods, and to generate among researchers an anti-collegial concern for credit. Some attempts to escape from the ethnocentrism of university departments are successful, although they tend to be marginal. Most numerous are interdepartmental groups of faculty members who, recognizing an area of common interest, come together to discuss issues, plan and conduct research, and perhaps even train graduate students. The typical life of these units is embattled and short. They are characteristically without budgets, tenure-track positions, degree-granting authority, or space of their own; younger faculty, fellows, and students are discouraged from participating; and the work that emerges is often viewed cynically by nonparticipating peers. University-associated research centers or institutes are one organizational means for facilitating interdisciplinary work. Lying outside departments, these free-standing research units are spared the intradepartmental competition for funds, although they are likely to encounter such competition at the institutional level. To avoid this, many research units make no claim on the general funds of their universities, relying almost entirely on external funding. Unfortunately, this policy--well-intentioned though it may be--is replete with its own problems: It condemns researchers to the relentless and time-consuming pursuit of financial support. In addition, the exclusion from teaching that often accompanies participation in these research centers is painful to those who genuinely like to teach; and the attendant separation from graduate students is a loss for both researchers and students. The net effect is to create a second class of university citizenship for research-only academics, which in turn generates among them a degree of resentment for lacking the titles, tenure, student access, and salary assurance that departmental membership confers. To achieve these advantages, researchers typically must pursue joint appointments in disciplinary departments. But when such dual appointments become numerous, they have a characteristic side effect: Centers and institutes that began with interdisciplinary aspirations become multidisciplinary instead, creating internal subdivisions that, ironically, conform to traditional departmental boundaries. The impediments to cooperation within universities and affiliated research institutes are reinforced by the federal agencies that represent the principal sources of support for research. The basic funding mechanism is the investigator- initiated grant, through which individuals receive support for discrete projects. While a proven strategy for establishing a base of fundamental knowledge within a field, this mechanism rewards narrowly drawn projects with specific goals that can be achieved within the period of the grant and fosters competition among investigators within a field. Peer-review panels and program managers, unable to fund all meritorious proposals, are forced to place significant weight on "track record," as evidenced in numbers of publications; to fund those proposals judged to have the highest probability of success; and to disallow costs necessary for sustained collaborative work--travel, communications, and multi-laboratory research. The cumulative result of these institutional behavior patterns is a research enterprise that primarily rewards work within disciplines, that fosters competition among investigators who ought to be pooling their intellectual capital, and that discourages collaboration of the kind needed to understand more comprehensively and address more successfully the complex medical and social problems that confront society. Private foundations, because of their smaller size and greater independence, are freer than government agencies to experiment with different mechanisms for organizing and funding research. The research networks in mental health and human development created by the MacAr-thur Foundation more than a decade ago constitute one such experiment. The networks were formed to advance knowledge and understanding of the factors that determine the course of mental and physical development across the life span. The decision to eschew conventional approaches to the support of research was based on the conviction that no single discipline could adequately address the complex phenomena of mental health and illness and the related questions of normal and pathological development. That conviction led to a difficult question: What sort of organization would be most appropriate to the interdisciplinary programmatic aims? The foundation board and staff considered establishing university research centers, but the restriction of participants to only a few institutions seemed undesirable, as did the probable embedding of the new research centers in the traditional administrative structures of their universities. Discussion of such problems led to the concept of "research centers without walls"--networks of collaborating scholars from all the relevant disciplines but not limited to a single institution. A dozen such networks have been formed to date, each typically consisting of 12 to 15 research scientists, from as many different universities and from a variety of disciplines--psychology, sociology, anthropology, genetics, molecular and cellular biology, and medicine, among others. The members of a network come together with commitments to the scientific problem area that defines the network, and to the adventure of interdisciplinary collaboration. A network meets four to six times a year, with timing and frequency set by its members. Each has a chairperson chosen by the foundation staff, an administrator, and a core budget, committed for an eight- to 10-year period, for travel, communication, and exploratory research. More ambitious projects may be separately funded, but the expectation is that network members will continue seeking support from the usual funding agencies. Each network has its own life story, but all have enough in common to suggest four explicit stages of organizational development: Listening Across the Gulf: Early meetings of networks show a familiar pattern of academic behavior: successive pronouncements more or less on the subject, heard with varying degrees of attention and comprehension by their listeners. The underlying task at this early stage is the search for a common theme, specific enough to attract members intellectually but general enough to give them room for exploration in their own terms. Conceptual Translation: The underlying task of the second stage is to develop a common language, a prerequisite for collaborative work. As the process of translation from the conceptual vocabulary of one discipline to another proceeds, members check the accuracy of their interpretations by means of metaphor and analogy. The result is a shared conceptual vocabulary, smaller and less specialized than the vocabulary of any single discipline, but enabling each network member to assimilate the work of other disciplines to his or her own. Onset of Collaboration: The third stage involves activities of consultation, marked by a high degree of mutual tolerance, an eagerness to help, and a willingness to be helped. In some networks, this level of integration leads quickly to the major collaborative efforts; in others, the process is more gradual, with members first taking ideas from group discussions back to their own offices and laboratories, where they work through the implications for their own research. Joint Projects: Some networks tend to reach this stage in their second year, some later. There are differences among them, but the similarities in structure and function are marked, as is similarity in the interdisciplinary character of the research product. In moving through these stages, network members identify the critical questions facing a field of inquiry, define an interdisciplinary agenda of research to address those questions, and conduct that research in a collaborative manner. To date, the networks launched by the MacArthur Foundation have made substantial progress in several areas, such as defining the factors that promote sustained mental and physical functioning in old age; identifying the determinants of health, psychological well-being, and social responsibility in middle age; understanding the characteristics of family, neighborhood, and school that lead to successful development among adolescents living in high-risk settings; defining the pathways through which mental state affects physiological functions and health outcomes; and understanding the interplay among genetic, biological, psychological, and social factors in the development of psychopathology. The results of this experiment in research organization show that, under the right circumstances, the network concept can work. Those circumstances include commitment and patience on the part of a funding agency; the availability of funds for meetings, travel, and communications; careful selection of individuals on the basis of their expertise, their sense of personal and professional security, and their commitment to interdisciplinary investigation; and continuing attention to the complexities of carrying out collaborative work across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Support for further experimentation of the interdisciplinary "institutes without walls" that we recommend is not intended to be a substitute for the traditional mechanisms for funding the work of individual investigators. Rather, these networks are specifically designed to build on and extend more focused disciplinary work. They enable scientists who are so inclined to devote a portion of their professional lives to collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines, institutions, and even cultures, and thus to share in the conduct of research that would otherwise remain beyond their reach. Robert L. Kahn is a professor, emeritus, of psychology and public health, and research scientist, emeritus, at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Denis J. Prager is president of Strategic Consulting Services in Chicago; until last month, he was director of the Health Program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Details on the MacArthur networks can be found in a booklet titled "An Experiment in Scientific Organization," written by Kahn and available from the Health Program Administrator, MacArthur Foundation, 140 S. Dearborn St., Suite 1100, Chicago, Ill. 60603; E-mail: rrunebor%macfdn@mcimail.com.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations Are A Scientific And Social Imperative

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Robert Kahn

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July 1994

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