Interdisciplinarity

“A synthetic biologist and a social scientist await death at the hands of an executioner. The executioner asks the social scientist if he has a final wish. Yes, he says, I have some new findings on the societal and ethical dimensions of synthetic biology and I want to present them to the scientific community before I die. The executioner then turns to the synthetic biologist and asks if she has a final wish. Yes, she said, just shoot me before I have to listen to that lecture.”

It’s a good joke. I have sat through many lectures over the years that make me sympathize with the synthetic biologist. Lest he offend anyone in the audience, the director quickly followed the joke with a disclaimer that certainly no one in the present audience harbored such sentiments. Nonetheless, the joke is instructive on several levels.

Synthetic biology is merely the latest in a long line of grand advances in the life sciences over the past several decades that have engendered calls to engage the social sciences (and sometimes even the humanities!) in fostering interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the myriad challenges presented by emerging technologies. The most prominent and formally institutionalized of these was, of course, the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) arm of the Human Genome Project. In other words, calls for interdisciplinarity are not new. This, in part, is what gives some bite to the director’s joke. 

But consider the same joke with the roles reversed. Would anyone laugh if it were the social scientist asking to be shot? I think not. This in itself reflects an ongoing imbalance in the relationship between the natural and social sciences when we call for interdisciplinary cooperation. The gist of the joke is not simply that the social scientist’s lecture might be mind-numbingly boring or opaque but that it is also superfluous. Science is where the action is, social science is an appendage at best, more likely an impediment.

The point was driven home for me by a story I heard from a bioethicist who attended a large NIH-sponsored interdisciplinary conference on the Human Genome Project some years ago. After some general discussion, one biologist in the audience stood up and said, “When are you ethicists going to take your heel off the pipeline of biomedical research!” The room erupted into applause.

Coming back to the recent National Academies conference on synthetic biology, the NSF director continued with a discussion of how important social scientists could be in helping to educate the public about science. That is, social scientists might be useful handmaidens to science, but not equal partners. (I use the gendered term deliberately, as the social sciences are also often feminized in these discussions). Shortly after the director of the NSF spoke, anthropologist Paul Rabinow pointed out that not only “the public,” but scientists themselves could do with some education, particularly in social, cultural and political issues of the sort social scientists specialize in.

This point is undoubtedly true and, I believe, well made. Nonetheless, we should not frame the issue simply in terms of competing areas of expertise. What is needed is a deeper attention to the basic framing and valuation of all the participants involved in addressing the challenges of new technologies. One place to begin, I think, is with a consideration of some of the structural or cultural impediments to productive interdisciplinarity. In this posting I would like to present one small but basic and often overlooked example of this type of impediment: what counts as work.

Over the years I have been part of a number of conferences and working groups of various sorts with both natural and social scientists trying to work together. I have found all the participants to be people of good will, genuinely interested in forging connections across disciplines. I have also found, however, a basic difference in attitude towards the meetings.

Specifically, for social scientists having meetings is what we do. It is an integral part of our work and the development and presentation of our ideas. I don’t mean formal professional conferences where papers are presented – all disciplines have these. I mean sitting around a table and talking about the social, cultural and political issues raised by science and technology. 

For many natural scientists, even the most interested, such meetings are almost invariably, at some level, experienced not as work but as time away from work – i.e. the lab –  or as an addition to their work load. This simple problem is not a matter of expertise, or heels on pipelines, but of what is valued structurally within a given discipline. I think we are more than ready to speak across disciplines. But we still need to work on creating the institutional space within which such conversation is valued as work, and supported as such.

Jonathan Kahn, J.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Law at Hamline University School of Law. He is currently working on a book titled Race in a Bottle: Law, Commerce and the Rise of Ethnic Medicine (forthcoming, Harvard University Press).