Nautilus

Whilst I have great sympathy for the grad students that are undertaking “interdisciplinary” graduate degrees I’d advise them to stop complaining and simply work HARD at it – viz. my own interdisciplinary story: I worked between 4 labs: a classical Biochemical Pharmacology Lab (thanks James Paxton), a toxicology lab (cheers Malcolm Tingle), a pre-term labor and fetal development lab (thanks Murray Mitchell) and, last but most important; the wonderful Jeff Keelan Lab that focused on the pharmacology of pregnancy and parturition. Most days it felt like I had multiple personality disorder.
It was hard.
I cried.
And seriously, it sucks when girls cry – it makes us seem weak and stupid. But you know what … those 4 professors and their collective willingness to train a young, brash student without spoon feeding her and still imparting a broad and rigorous experience, well; they ensured my later success as an academic. I am proud to consider myself their “academic child”. To whit; I emigrated to the US with a PhD at 24 and did a three year post-doc in Nevada with Chris Pritsos (who is surely one of the all-time greats in post-doctoral mentoring – particularly in teaching his post docs about how to run a lab).
I am currently 18 months into a tenure track Assistant Professor of Pharmacology position at the University of Hawaii. Our lab has 3 MS,1 PhD and 1 Tech (Hi guys!). I believe was the youngest Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in the USA (28 years old) when appointed and for all I know I still am at 30. My current position is testament to my interdisciplinary training, the excellence of my mentors and the fact that I consciously rejected sentiments such as those stated in the current article i.e. “We have found it difficult to synthesize the separate perspectives of two or more disciplines into a meaningful middle ground.” Sorry guys but that’s bollocks. If you want to synthesize something then do it! If you need to make it meaningful – go ahead.
Remember, I am one who has been through this. It’s much harder for interdisciplinary grad students than for those with a highly defined career path, but ‘twas ever thus and while there are more of you than ever lately, I actually think your career path is more rewarding. You really can change the world.
What I offer is free advice of my own personal experience and a wise man once told me that an opinion is only worth what you pay for it. I have no RO1 yet, but since I am an eternal optimist I feel that I can achieve this even in our current funding environment of 8%. I would tell all of you interdisciplinary grad students to think positive, strive for excellence and have faith in yourselves and your science.

Smith and Carey (Nature 447, 638-639) addresses the need for supportive environments if interdisciplinary research goals are to be achieved. Specifically they highlight the lack of institutional structure and support for such research. Also, they mention that assessments of such research quality are made in single subject committees in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
I sympathise with their point of view and took mine to the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee general review of UK research in 1999 (http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmsctech/196/196ap02.htm). I feel sure there were many other inputs but suffice to say that I felt that the input was received constructively and several useful developments occurred. These included (i) several generic funding initiatives, specifically genomics, e-science and IT, where interdisciplinary investigators and teams could apply to tackle broader-than-a-single-subject research objectives (ii) discipline hopping awards were introduced to encourage researchers who wish to be mobile in their research interests and (iii) a unified ‘road show’ by the UK Research Councils to take input from the UK research community on current concerns (iv) clear efforts within the UK Research Councils in their Newsletters to describe research interface developments (v) research assessment input ie the UK RAE four publications submission allows for a commentary which flags across-the-disciplines relevance.
Obviously my wish for a unified science and engineering research council, with a single charter and unified management structure, was not achieved of course but I still feel that the official efforts made to respond to criticisms have put the UK in a more flexible position by my having ‘spoken out’. In effect then I commend these compromises as helpful developments.
For myself, since my speaking out, I would log here that (i) a UK BBSRC Programme Manager pointed out to me, matter-of-factly, that my total number of applications made was not so large; I took this to mean that I had unreasonable expectations of my success rate of applications to funded proposals (ii) I reassessed my own core research activities and focussed on that to good effect re obtaining new grants from the Research Councils (iii) my ambitions to diversify further across the disciplines I have achieved by rehoning my physics and chemistry research skills and ‘putting myself about’ to join in projects as diverse as an allergy protein study and a muscle protein study in biology and, in core chemistry, studies of molecular sieve catalysts and colouring agents. Of course I also received input from researchers in response to my letter to the UK Parliament. These taught me that I was not alone in my views but also that my notion of interdisciplinary research was rather narrow ie being based solely in the molecular sciences.
At present, there remains another big issue on-the-block. It seems to be officially ok that the ratio of grant proposals made to those funded can be 3 to 5. The implicit assumption being that this level of unfunded proposals is required to ensure quality. This is a very arbitrary measure of research quality. Seeing excellent proposals, agreed by referees and my own experience, finally get rejected, I know that the ‘unfunded ratio’ as a measure is deeply flawed as a metric, at least at this level of underfunding. Some schemes we read about even proclaim a ratio of 10 to 1 or even 50 to 1 unfunded. The time wasted by researchers in chasing such schemes is a colossal loss to the research system. The official answer is to ration the number of proposals we make. Is that really the answer?
The real answer is a combination of answers to do with (i) the percentage of GDP spent on research, which is generally agreed to be too low (ii) the balance between the strategic and responsive modes and (iii) the fact that University staff must chase overheads due to general underfunding of Universities in the first place. Of course, to come back to interdisciplinary research the fact that it is now an accepted category of strategic research has no doubt exacerbated the overall underfunding problem. However getting new money into the national research enterprise requires a decent, big, new, idea. Previously this, arguably, was genomics or e-science (as above).
Perhaps interdisciplinary research could be the new big idea? Certainly the book alert by Nature to:- http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309094356/html/R1.html
we need to study carefully as it might indeed provide the blueprint for eg an Interdisciplinary Research Council with its own autonomous budget and overall giving an increase to research budgets in both strategic and responsive mode domains.
The aims and objectives of an Interdisciplinary Research Council should in my view address truly relevant topics eg Energy research, Security, Ethics…..To assemble an interdisciplinary team to address biological questions or chemical or medical questions should surely remain within the domain of, respectively, BBSRC or EPSRC or MRC ie using the UK agencies as a model. In the USA, which has a Department of Energy already, means of course that a US Interdisciplinary Research Council would not include Energy research as it already has this covered.
In conclusion, I applaud the letter from Smith and Carey which will surely assist research funding and practice for across the disciplines research, and its assessment, whether via a new agency or improved awareness within the current agencies. The US National Academy Analysis looks most interesting and needs careful study.
John R Helliwell
Professor of Structural Chemistry
The University of Manchester