If universities and medical schools continue to create new scientists from the old mold, thousands of new biologists, chemists, physicists, and doctors will venture into new laboratories unprepared for necessary interdisciplinary involvement. They need this preparation now to meet medical and technological challenges, such as curing AIDS, creating nuclear fusion, and finding environmentally sound ways to dispose of waste.
However, while scientists now face critical problems in health and environmental research that can be solved only by innovative, unified approaches, educators still teach science within tightly drawn disciplinary boundaries.
The amount of information generated daily in a field such as cancer research is now daunting. It comes from many disciplines in both the laboratory-based basic sciences, such as biochemistry and molecular biology, and the patient-based medical specialties, such as pathology and medicine. A cancer researcher who must digest this overwhelming amount of information needs a broad- based education and laboratory ...
