Partners in Research, Competitors in Pay

Early in his career, Russ Altman and members of his lab at Stanford University devised a new data analysis strategy. They drafted the manuscript about their approach and, before sending it to a computer science journal, showed it to the biologists whose raw data they had used. These colleagues expressed great distress at seeing their results in the methods paper, and insisted the team delay submitting the manuscript until they prepared a paper detailing the biological conclusions. Altman agreed to temporarily shelve the manuscript. He also made a mental note to himself: Start the discussion about manuscripts and authorships at the beginning of the project. "It's one thing to have a hard conversation before any of the results are in," he relates. "But it's another to start talking when the results are already in, and you realize that you never really talked about distributing the credit in the publications." Altman, who is an associate professor of genetics and medicine at Stanford, makes many such notes to himself as he coordinates the work of interdisciplinary teams in an academic setting. Such coordination has become critical because understanding data—in genomics, cognitive neuroscience, or ecological biodiversity—increasingly involves collaborations between research groups with different specialties. These collaborative networks are the nexus of the new European Research Area's planned €17,000 million program to boost competitiveness with the United States with genomics and biotechnology for health programs each receiving €2,200 million. Interdisciplinary research also dominates the priority lists of the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Private funders also have joined the new multidisciplinary mainstream. The European Science Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that sponsors scientist conferences and networks, is supporting a host of worldwide interdisciplinary collaborations. The first, "Origin of Man, Language and Languages," has attracted 138 funding applications for €130 million in grants from disciplines as diverse as linguistics and molecular biology. The Isis Fund, launched by the US Society for Women's Health Research, will join other sex-based funding groups to finance travel and conferences for scientists. Ortho-McNeil and Aventis Pharmaceuticals have each donated $1 million (US) to the fund. Despite such abundance, interdisciplinary research requires a sometimes painful overhauling of rules in settings traditionally defined by departmental boundaries and independent research. The loosening of these customs alone can create insecurities and reticence among scientists, and conflicts over publication, promotion, and pay issues only help build obstacles to effective interdisciplinary collaboration. "You cannot assume it will all work out," Altman says. "You must put in positive energy to get it to work out." Peer Review or Perish Senior scientists often dominate the peer review committees of the science journals in which their colleagues must be published to be promoted. Schooled in a single-discipline approach, these established researchers may not be open to mixing the disciplines. Fear of not getting published and not getting that coveted tenured position could keep scientists away from interdisciplinary research. Richard B. Hoover, astrobiology group leader, space science directorate, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, says panels peopled by such scientists do not foster the spirit of collaborative work. "You get into trouble when you lock yourself into a single discipline," he says. "You have people settled into rigid ideas." Courtesy of Richard FinnellRichard Finnell For graduate students, interdisciplinary collaborations can help push-start their publication record; an early collaboration with a team can build new professional contacts that can help generate subsequent first-authored papers, according to Richard Finnell, director of the Institute of Bioscience and Technology, Texas A&;M University System Health Science Center. But without evidence of substantial independent work, academic promotion committees have trouble evaluating such students for advancement. "[The] committees have a difficult time deciding whether your ideas are your own unless substantiated by solitary publications or publications on which you are senior or corresponding author," says Carmen Sapienza, genetics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Strong support letters from collaborators to the promotions committee can help. "[But] sometimes letters from collaborators that assign credit to someone other than themselves may be difficult to obtain (ego dependent), and even if such letters are obtained, they may be discounted." Promotion problems have prompted some interdisciplinary research sponsors, such as the MacArthur Foundation, to limit full participation to tenured faculty members. "It's still a disciplinary world out there," says Nancy Adler, the foundation's director of the socioeconomic status and health network. "When people go for jobs, if [the job] is not easy to define, if it looks too weird, it's hard for them to get jobs." Some funding agencies, such as the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which foster participation of junior faculty in interdisciplinary research programs, recognize the important roles that senior participants in such collaborations can play in supporting junior members. Megan Gunnar, professor of behavioral psychology at the University of Minnesota, heads an NIMH-funded interdisciplinary research network to study stress and early childhood development. She includes junior researchers and selects senior scientists for the team who are eager to promote less-experienced colleagues. "There has to be a group sentiment about supporting the career development of the younger members," Gunnar says. "The senior folks are doing the advising and consulting and the junior people are doing the research. This gives the junior researchers established networks of people with whom they can feel comfortable talking about their work." Michael Merson, dean of the School of Public Health at Yale University, urges senior scientists to educate the officials who determine the academic fate of junior faculty members. Merson, who heads Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, says he uses regularly scheduled meetings with other administrators to provide information about HIV research. "This helps the deans and chairs understand why their faculty are interested in participating in center activities," Merson says. His position as dean allows him to emphasize the importance of work by the psychologists at the center, for example, though their work may not be groundbreaking in strictly psychological terms. Such public cheerleading may be of no assistance to graduate students who might be reluctant to participate in team projects, Altman notes, because they believe the research cannot be included in their dissertation. "You need to let them know that, when they write their dissertation, it's OK to include results that weren't entirely gathered on their own as long as they properly attribute who did what," Altman explains. "This lets the student's committee see what the student contributed to the collaborative project." Scales of Collaboration Interdisciplinary projects can expose pay-scale differences among disciplines, especially at grant-writing time, when, for example, the salaries requested for postdoctoral fellows or technical support staff must be listed on the application. Bioinformaticians' salaries reflect the great demand for them in academia. "A typical [biomedical sciences] postdoc might make $35,000-$40,000 [US]," Altman says. "I must pay $55,000-$65,000 for people trained in informatics. We can ask for that on NIH grants." Low pay for a postdoctoral fellow is a long-standing tradition in biology, but not so for computer scientists with training in biology. Because they are so rare, "even biotech firms are surprised at how much [such scientists] can command," says Altman. According to an August 2001 survey of 7,902 researchers by The Scientist, bioinformaticians collect a median of $75,000 in salary and cash compensation; the median for all life scientists is $55,000.1 "That's what the market demands," says Finnell. "If the university doesn't pay it, the computer scientist will go to industry." When junior biology professors take part in such collaborative programs, they find out that people more junior than they get the same salary and they think it's unfair. "There's a real disconnect here," adds Finnell. Many biology postdocs have started "cross-training" in computer science to make up the salary gap. This poses challenges for laboratory heads who recruit and hire biology postdocs for the expertise they bring to the group. "Their feet may be planted in the lab, but their full attention isn't there," he explains. "I can't blame them, but, you want to infuse them with your interest. In our case, that's developmental biology. But they're looking at the future." That view promises further interdisciplinary re-search and more formally cross-trained researchers. Problems with promotion, publication, and pay can be discussed openly in such forums. Finnell says he now sees "how wonderful and how beneficial it is to build strong relationships with other labs that have different perspectives and different technical skills. You can get much more done much faster. And, collectively, you can ask better questions and get better answers." Beth Schachter (bschachter@nasw.org) is a freelance writer in New York City. Christine Bahls (cbahls@the-scientist.com) also contributed to this report. References 1. P. Park, The long road to riches in the life sciences, The Scientist 15[18]:30, Sept. 17, 2001. See also: 'Interdisciplinary Research Gets Formal' The Interdisciplinary Funding Stream European Commission: The Sixth Framework calls for an investment of €2,200 million in interdisciplinary genomics and health research. europa.eu.int/comm/research/nfp.html Integrated Projects and Networks of Excellence: "Tens of millions of euros" will be invested in large-scale interdisciplinary research programs from 2002 to 2006 and calls for proposals are soon to be announced. europa.eu.int/comm/research/nfp/networks-ip.html The National Science Foundation: In 2003, the NSF will fund grants similar to the three listed below: Quantum and Biologically Inspired Computing (QuBIC): The program finances interdisciplinary research to improve computer and information sciences and engineering by incorporating insights from either biological systems or quantum foundations, $5 million (US) will be available to fund 15 grants. A typical QuBIC award will range from $100,000 to $500,000 per year for as many as three years. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02017/nsf02017.html#TOC Partnerships for Innovation (PFI): To stimulate wealth-creation and national well being, the program will support 15-25 promising partnerships among academe, state/local/federal government, and the private sector that will explore new approaches to support and sustain innovation. The project will hand out 15 to 25 awards of up to $600,000 (US) for a total of $9 million. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02060/nsf02060.html Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for Integrated Research and Education in Environmental Systems: Forty to fifty awards totaling $37.5 million (US) approximately 20-25 will be for research projects and 20-25 will be for exploratory, conference, or planning activities. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02010/nsf02010.html

Partners in Research, Competitors in Pay

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