Interdisciplinary Collaborations Offer Mutual Fulfillment

Scientists most often work with collaborators in the same or closely related disciplines, and they usually strike up their relationships in professional settings or at social gatherings. Unusual, then, is the collaboration between Glenn C. Conroy and Michael W. Vannier. Conroy is a biological anthropologist and paleontologist, while Vannier is a radiologist--and their relationship was launched by a trip to the grocery that Conroy took one day. While waiting in the checkout line, Conroy browsed through the adjacent stacks of magazines and tabloids. He was taken with the cover of Discover magazine, which featured Vannier's imaging techniques. "There was a colorful cover photo of a computer image of a human skull," says Conroy, who at the time was hoping to find a noninvasive method to differentiate mineralized bone from the rock matrix inside and outside. "After reading the article, I learned that this photograph wasn't just a computer simulation--it was a real, three-dimensional image of a skull, generated by computed tomography with the flesh electronically removed. I was dazzled. I thought, `If you could do this for living humans, maybe you could do it for a fossil.'" Conroy and Vannier's teamwork is unusual in ways other than its unorthodox origins. It represents a union between the traditionally disparate disciplines of clinical science and social science. The latter is one of the eight categories of "science" as defined by the National Science Foundation. The other categories are physical science, mathematical science, computer specialties, environmental science, life science, psychology, and engineering. At the time he met Vannier, Conroy, then on the faculty in the division of biology and medicine at Brown University in Providence, R.I., was being recruited by other institutions. He was considering a move to the departments of anthropology and of anatomy and neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Coincidentally, Vannier's work had been done at Washington University. "So when I came to St. Louis for my interview [at Washington University], I looked up this Dr. Vannier whom I'd read about in the magazine," Conroy recalls. "I squeezed into his tiny office, pulled this fossil cast out of a bag, and said, `Do you think there's anything we can do with this type of problem?' " For his part, Vannier says that Conroy's "excitement and enthusiasm are infectious, so it was easy to become intrigued with the possibility." Their collaboration eventually produced high-quality computed tomography (CT) images of fossils from South Africa. Collaborations that cross disciplines are fertile meeting grounds "because of the complexity of scientific problems," says James M. Tiedje, director of the interdisciplinary Center for Microbial Ecology (CME) at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Tiedje says he believes that the key element in collaborations between researchers from disparate disciplines is synergy: "People have to see their common goal as exciting. Then it's a natural sort of collaboration, not one that's artificial." CME was established two years ago by the National Science Foundation as one of its 11 science and technology centers (The Scientist, Feb. 4, 1991, page 1). The Michigan State center is a unit made up of some 30 faculty from many departments and disciplines, some outside the university. Besides the $7 million commitment from NSF for five-year support, CME gets "significant money" from the state, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and industry, according to Tiedje, who is also a professor of crop and soil sciences and of microbiology at Michigan State. "The topics we work on are broader and longer-range than those typically in the P.I. [principal investigator] grant system," says Tiedje. "Usually, they're the types of problems that are ignored because of their breadth and the length of effort they would require." In addition, he says, when a research problem is first proposed, center staff "evaluate the problem to see what broader range of disciplines need to be brought in to come up with the most comprehensive solution." Noting that he believes there's a place for both center-based research and individual collaborative projects, Tiedje thinks that the latter "don't cover all the research needs of our country. The problem now is the overall shortage of funds for all research." "You do need funding, that's a given," says protein chemist Michael G. Harrington of the California Institute of Technology's Center for Molecular Biotechnology (CMB) in Pasadena, another STC. "But you also need to have an awareness of interest in your work from colleagues, not just from collaborators." Harrington, who does research in cooperation with a laser spectroscopist, says he thinks that both sufficient funding and a sense of interdisciplinary camaraderie are amply supplied by CMB's director, Leroy E. Hood: "Lee is a very relevant part of fostering the right kind of environment, as is Caltech--the environment here is very rich. There's a general awareness of how much there is to be gained by an interdisciplinary approach and the interesting problems to be tackled." Vannier, the Washington University radiologist, says that even during funding lapses, he and Conroy find ways to continue working together. But he's not sure exactly why their collaboration has been so heartily encouraged by their respective colleagues. Says Vannier: "In some institutions, there's a lot of infighting and childish games. If that exists [at Washington University], I'm unaware of it. Maybe that comes from being in the Midwest, or may-be it comes from the institution. Wherever it comes from, it makes these kind of collaborations very comfortable." Robert W. Sussman, professor of anthropology at Washington University, took earth and planetary scientist Glen Green to Madagascar to map via satellite the rain forests that are home to the lemurs Sussman has observed for 20 years. The eastern rain forest was clearly diminished, as shown on land satellite images, when compared with earlier aerial maps. The shrinking habitat was most likely behind the disappearing numbers of lemurs. Sussman and Green's research indicated that the rain forests were disappearing at lower elevations, mostly in areas where the rural population cuts timber for firewood. The Madagascar project especially appealed to Green, who is now Pew Teacher- Scholar Fellow in the department of geology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. "I liked the fact that a primate biologist [Sussman] was interested in conservation," says Green. "And he was willing to tackle a problem like remote sensing, something he knew nothing about." Noting that cross-disciplinary work is often talked about but seldom done because of the way academic departments are set up as separate entities, Green points out that scientific problems can't be solved in nice, neat packages: "That's not the way the world works." This philosophy is shared by Caltech's Harrington. Harrington has pulled laser spectroscopist Jerry Solomon away from mapping stars at the school's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work on a different kind of mapping project--analyzing the data from the thousands of spots proteins create when they migrate in a two-dimensional pattern on an electrophoresis gel. Harrington says that he and Solomon hit it off well almost immediately when they began working together 2 1/2 years ago. "I knew what the problem was with existing approaches to analyzing gels' images," Harrington says. "Jerry was very familiar with spectral image analysis, but was receptive to analyzing these gels." Working with collaborators like Solomon has helped Harrington learn more about his own field. "Just because of image analysis, there's a series of ways for me to analyze 2-D gels that I didn't think of before," Harrington explains. "I'm able to tackle protein-detection bottlenecks with much better knowledge of protein's physical properties." To analyze the proteins in a single cell, Harrington and Solomon have had to make improvements in their chemical method of detection and in instrumentation. Harrington says that Solomon's wisdom about instrumentation made this formidable task more manageable: "When we see a problem in analyzing a gel, we enjoy trying to figure out whether it should be tackled in the wet lab or in image analysis." "Mike and I see eye to eye on details like how the gels are prepared," says Solomon. "We iterate back and forth, as many times as necessary. Without that agreement on a basic approach, our collaboration wouldn't go anywhere." Solomon adds, with a laugh, "I've also learned a lot about molecular biology." One scientist's ignorance of another's discipline is not necessarily an impediment to a successful collaboration. Mathematician Frank Hoppensteadt got a crash course in bacterial genetics when he teamed up with physician Richard P. Novick on a project to quantify inheritance of bacterial plasmids. Although Hoppensteadt's foray into the world of bacteria had been primed in an earlier summer course at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, he says that collaborator Novick "is incredibly good at presenting fairly complicated material in a simple way." Noting that "genetics generally is the outstanding application of mathematics in life sciences," Hoppensteadt, dean of the College of Natural Sciences at Michigan State, says that his work with Novick "gave me credentials in microbial ecology and genetics, which in turn opened the doors to other collaborations." Novick, on staff at the Public Health Research Institute, a nonprofit New York foundation, says that the mathematical outcome of their work "was clear and convincing." His choice of a mathematician as a collaborator stems from his admitted lack of proficiency in advanced mathematics: "I've always been interested in math, but anything beyond the rudiments of simple linear differential equations, I'm lost." Mathematics has a great deal to offer the life sciences, Novick notes, "and it's not used as much as it might be." But the smooth progress of interdisciplinary collaborations can hit some bumps, especially if one member of the team is not trained in science. Such was the case when artist Wallace G. Walker contacted mathematician Doris Schattschneider in 1972. Walker, now an independent graphic artist in Shreveport, La., wanted information on how one of his artistic creations, a form that he named Iso-Axis, fit into mathematics. In two dimensions, Iso-Axis is a grid of 60 isosceles triangles that, when folded and rotated, can assume a variety of three-dimensional shapes. Schattschneider, head of the mathematics department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., was already a scholar of M.C. Escher's art, which is famous for its geometric symmetry and illusion of infinite continuity. After becoming intrigued with Iso-Axis, she decided to collaborate with Walker to superimpose Escher's designs onto a shape derived from the Iso-Axis surface, creating an art form they dubbed kaleidocycles. Their book, M.C. Escher Kaleidocycles, originally published in 1977 by Ballantine Books Inc. of New York, is currently published in the United States by Pomegranate Artbooks (Petaluma, Calif., 1987). Schattschneider remembers their collaboration as "excruciating. [Walker] is a very fine artist, whose work is heavily geometric, yet he hasn't the foggiest notion of what he's done mathematically. I found that he couldn't understand either my words or my pictures--he had to reinvent everything himself. This often required us to get together so he could show me models and I could illustrate folding patterns." Walker, who created Iso-Axis in 1953 as a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., says that Schattschneider "taught me a lot about geometric forms. I failed geometry in school because I never knew what a cube looked like. I look at geometry as art; I'm not interested in formulas." Schattschneider says that there are many people, like Escher and Walker, "whose understanding of mathematics is purely visual--Escher's notebooks were all visual, containing mostly pictures, few words." Currently, Schattschneider is working on a visual geometry project based at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. This project will produce new geometry curriculum materials that are visual and manipulative. "They'll be a nontraditional way of teaching geometry. People like Escher and Walker have a different way of understanding that must be accommodated." Suzanne Hagan is a St. Louis-based freelance writer specializing in science and medicine.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations Offer Mutual Fulfillment

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