Zare floats plan to
jump-start interdisciplinary research
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY
In science circles, everybody talks
about interdisciplinary research, but nobody does
anything about it. Despite repeated calls for more
interdisciplinary collaboration, scientific research in
the United States, with a few exceptions, remains as
departmentalized as ever.
That is the contention of
Norman Metzger, executive director of the National
Research Council Commission on Physical Sciences,
Mathematics and Applications, and Richard N. Zare, the
Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry at
Stanford.
In an article titled
"Interdisciplinary Research: From Belief to
Reality," published in the Jan. 29 issue of the
journal Science, the two briefly discuss the
structural and cultural roadblocks to interdisciplinary
research and propose a "modest" national
program that would reap substantial returns by fostering
collaboration between scientists in different
disciplines.
The pair calculate that it
would take an investment of about $75 million per year to
achieve a "critical mass" that would produce a
"substantial and healthy change" in the
fundamental nature of the research enterprise.
"Despite all its
potential benefits, interdisciplinary research will not
take off until someone starts investing a significant
amount of money in it," Zare says.
Since World War II, the
federal government has become the primary patron of
scientific research. The system has spawned a confusing
number of government agencies and offices that support
basic research. But a link has been forged with the
nation's research universities that has proven
"spectacularly successful," Zare and Metzger
write.
But this success has
covered up substantial failures of omission, the two
argue. Their prime example is environmental research. The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a sizable
research and development program, but it has been focused
single-mindedly on short-term, immediate goals. "The
upshot, in our view, is that high-quality work on
fundamental issues related to environmental matters has
been and continues to be underemphasized in the federal
R&D portfolio," they assert.
Another example is
information technology. The federal government has
invested large sums of money in the technology, but, at
the same time, it has slighted collateral areas of
research, such as human performance and cognitive
science, that might have made "IT" easier to
use, Metzger and Zare state.
They also single out the
peer review method for distributing research funds as one
of the contributing factors for the continuing ascendancy
of disciplinary research. "Peer review by definition
came to mean judgments by those from a single
discipline," they write. So "judgments on
research support, critical to an academic career, became
increasingly more specialized and
discipline-bounded."
Metzger and Zare's
prescription to begin filling in the chinks in the
national research effort is to create an entirely new
program that is "owned" by several disciplines
within an existing funding agency or even by several
agencies. The program would provide long-term support for
interdisciplinary teams that work along broad,
agreed-upon lines. Participating agencies would rely on
interdisciplinary committees to pick the strongest
proposals.
Metzger and Zare propose
selecting 10 teams each year to receive non-renewable,
five-year grants of $1.5 million annually. This money not
only would support the principals but also could be used
for graduate and undergraduate students and equipment.
Some of the funds also would go to the departments
involved to compensate them for the loss of the
principal's time. The authors envision reviewing each
program after two years and shutting any that are
deficient.
One of the major functions
of these interdisciplinary programs would be to
"re-integrate" the scientific knowledge that is
currently "dis-integrated and disaggregated" by
university departments in a process "famous for its
turf battles and jurisdictional disputes," they
state.
"If such a
reintegration of the knowledge process can be
accomplished, then the program will have made great
strides in redefining the character of the American
research university and in preparing our nation to make
scientific and technological contributions to solving
ever more complex societal problems." SR
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