TEAM A
sking for US$40 million is never easy, but Theodore
ILLUSTRATION BY DEAN TRIPPE
Brown knew his pitch would be a particularly tough
sell. As vice-chancellor for research at the University
of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the early 1980s,
Brown had been tasked with soliciting a major dona-
tion from wealthy chemist and entrepreneur Arnold Beckman,
SCIENCE
a graduate of the university. Beckman was hesitant, believing
that the university should receive most of its support from the
state. So Brown decided to devise a project like nothing he had
ever seen before.
In 1983, he and his colleagues put together a proposal for an
institute that had little chance of being funded through normal
channels. It would defy the powerful disciplinary cartography
that defines many modern universities, bringing together
members of different departments and inducing them to work
together on common projects. Brown argued that it would allow
faculty members to tackle bigger scientific and societal ques-
tions than they normally could.
“The problems challenging us today, the ones really worth
Interdisciplinarity has become all working on, are complex, require sophisticated equipment and
the rage as scientists tackle society’s intellectual tools, and just don’t yield to a narrow approach,” he
says. “The traditional structure of university departments and
biggest problems. But there is still colleges was not conducive to cooperative, interdisciplinary
strong resistance to crossing borders. work.”
It was an early example of the push for interdisciplinary
research that is now sweeping universities around the globe.
BY HEIDI LEDFORD Although Brown was not completely alone — the interdiscipli-
nary Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico was founded around the
same time — he was advocating crossing boundaries before it
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became fashionable. And his proposal met strong resistance. the catalogue swelled from 10 pages to 2,300, covering
Department heads fretted that faculty members — and their 7,000 species.
grants — would be snatched away. Some colleagues scorned In the nineteenth century, the disciplinary boundaries of
Brown’s idea of creating open office spaces to foster interac- the modern university started to take root. The disciplines
tions between graduate students: surely the din would make surged in number and power after the Second World War, as
it impossible to get serious work done. And then there was nations, particularly the United States, boosted their research
the stigma. “Interdisciplinary research is for people who support. “It’s the moment when universities increased expo-
aren’t good enough to make it in their own field,” an illustri- nentially,” says Vincent Larivière, an information scientist at
ous physicist chided. the University of Montreal in Canada. “And the size of the
But Beckman liked the idea and committed the full university increased by creating more departments.”
$40-million asking price — at that time, the largest-ever Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union
private donation to a US public university. A few hectic also played a part, says Weingart. The Soviets boasted a
years later, the 29,000-square-metre Beckman Institute for research programme geared towards solving societal prob-
Advanced Science and Technology was born. lems, for example improving agriculture to boost food secu-
The institute struggled to recruit a qualified director willing rity. By contrast, US President Dwight Eisenhower argued
to take a chance on the new model, so Brown took the helm. that basic research should be untethered. “In the field of intel-
Soon, large grants from organizations such as the Department lectual exploration, true freedom can and must be practised,”
of Defense and the National Science Foundation poured in, he said in a 1959 speech. And although basic research need
hushing many critics. By the time Brown left the institute in not necessarily be disciplinary, it does not have the same
1993, other leading universities were sending delegations there pressure towards interdisciplinarity as does applied research.
to learn from the model. Researchers from Beckman — which
now has more than 200 affiliated faculty members — have
achieved attention-grabbing results, including helping to cre-
ate one of the first graphical web browsers. “WE HAVE TO BRING PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT KINDS
Since the Beckman was founded, the interdisciplinary
model has spread around the world, countering the trend OF SKILLS AND EXPERTISE TOGETHER. NO ONE HAS
EVERYTHING THAT’S NEEDED.”
towards specialization that had dominated science since the
Second World War. Cross-cutting institutes have sprouted
up in the United States, Europe, Japan, China and Australia,
among other places, as researchers seek to solve complex
problems such as climate change, sustainability and public- Specialities proliferated as individual disciplines were
health issues. The interdisciplinary trend can be seen in pub- repeatedly subdivided. Biology was split into botany and
lication data, where more than one-third of the references in zoology, then into evolutionary biology, molecular biology,
scientific papers now point to other disciplines (see page 306). microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, bioengineering and
“The problems in the world are not within-discipline prob- more. Late last year, Jerry Jacobs, a sociologist at the Univer-
lems,” says Sharon Derry, an educational psychologist at the sity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, counted the number of
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies inter- biology-related departments at Michigan State University in
disciplinarity. “We have to bring people with different kinds East Lansing. There were nearly 40.
of skills and expertise together. No one has everything that’s From this thicket, the term ‘interdisciplinary’ emerged.
needed to deal with the issues that we’re facing.” The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates
Even so, supporters of interdisciplinary research say that it back to December 1937, in a sociology journal. But even at
has been slow to catch on, and those who do cross academic that time, some believed that the word was already over-
disciplines face major challenges when applying for grants, used. In a report to the US Social Science Research Council
seeking promotions or submitting papers to high-impact in August that year, a sociologist at the University of Chicago
journals. In many cases, scientists say, the trend is nothing in Illinois lumped ‘interdisciplinarity’ in with other “catch
more than a fashionable label. “There’s a huge push to call phrases and slogans which were not sufficiently critically
your work interdisciplinary,” says David Wood, a bioengineer examined” (R. Frank Items 40, 73–78; 1988).
at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “But there’s As an academic movement, interdisciplinarity caught on
still resistance to doing actual interdisciplinary science.” during the 1970s and has been growing ever since, says Lari-
vière. He credits that rise in part to libraries, which began
to stockpile subscriptions and improved researchers’ access
HIGHLY DISCIPLINED to journals in alternative fields. A particle physicist could
more easily browse biology journals, say. Furthermore, the
The idea of dividing academic inquiry into discrete categories US focus began to shift from basic research and scientific
dates back to Plato and Aristotle, but by the sixteenth century, liberty back to societal problems such as environmental pro-
Francis Bacon and other philosophers were mourning the tection, which can rarely be tackled by a single discipline.
fragmentation of knowledge. The United States was not alone: in 1994, an influential
One problem lay in the rapid growth of science: there was book partially sponsored by the Swedish Council for Plan-
too much information spread across the disciplines for any ning and Coordination of Research called The New Produc-
one person to handle. Science historian Peter Weingart of tion of Knowledge (Sage) predicted, among other things,
Bielefeld University in Germany an increasingly interdisciplinary
points to Carl Linnaeus’s taxo-
nomic treatise Systema Naturae as
INTERDISCIPLINARITY future as science seeks to solve
socially relevant questions. That
an example: between its first edi-
A Nature special issue book had an impact, says Lariv-
nature.com/inter
tion in 1735 and its last in 1768, ière, particularly in the European
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NEWS FEATURE
Union’s Fifth Framework funding programme, which over the past decade, including the Academy for Advanced
ran from 1998 to 2002 and emphasized interdisciplinary, Interdisciplinary Studies at Peking University in Beijing. The
problem-oriented research. NSFC plans to launch further interdisciplinary projects in the
Soon, interdisciplinary institutes began to sprout up coming years, says Yonghe Zheng, deputy director-general of
around the world, each with its own unique structure and the foundation’s Bureau of Science Policy. “China is a devel-
purpose. One of the first, the Santa Fe Institute, founded in oping country,” he says. “So the universities and institutes can
1984, focused on applying advanced mathematics and com- quickly set up some new centres which reflect the new trend
putational skills to a range of disciplines. Others, such as in interdisciplinary research.”
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore estab-
“THERE IS CONSTANT PRESSURE ON ME TO MAKE A lished its Interdisciplinary Graduate School in 2012; it
already has 335 students, out of a total graduate-school
population of 2,000. Nanyang’s interdisciplinary graduate
CROSS-FACULTY, CROSS-INSTITUTION ALLIANCE. IF I programme, which bills itself as the first of its kind in Asia,
was designed in part to expand the university’s fundraising
WANT TO BUILD A NEW BUILDING, THE MORE ALLIES options, says Bo Liedberg, dean of the programme. Because
industry is often focused on real-world problems that cross
I HAVE, THE EASIER IT IS TO RAISE THE MONEY.” disciplines, an interdisciplinary programme could foster
more collaborations with business, he reasons.
That focus on interdisciplinarity as a revenue stream is
widespread, says Merlin Crossley, a molecular biologist and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s David H. Koch dean of the faculty of life sciences at the University of New
Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in Cambridge, or South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “There is constant pressure
the neuroscience-focused Janelia Research Campus in Ash- on me to make a cross-faculty, cross-institution alliance,” he
burn, Virginia, tackle questions within a specific discipline says. “If I want to build a new building, the more allies I have,
but draw in work from other fields. And some, such as the the easier it is to raise the money.” Arizona State University
Monash Sustainability Institute in Clayton, Australia, focus in Tempe saw its federal funding rise by 162% from 2003 to
on specific problems. 2012 as it promoted interdisciplinarity across its campus (see
Even as the trend gained momentum, interdisciplinary Nature 514, 292–294; 2014).
researchers continued to hit the same hurdles that Brown Despite this pressure, interdisciplinarity’s reach remains
had encountered. In 1998, chemist Richard Zare at Stanford modest. For every Nanyang or Durham, there are hundreds
University in California helped to launch the interdiscipli- of universities that have not embraced significant change.
nary institute Bio-X. But an influential colleague urged him Departmental dividers remain in place — and in power — at
not to move his lab into the Bio-X building. Doing so would most institutions, says Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist at
essentially take Zare away from the chemistry department the University of Iowa in Iowa City who co-chaired the com-
and his committee and teaching duties there, the colleague mittee that wrote the National Academies report more than
argued, weakening the department. a decade ago. “It has been an enormous disappointment.”
Although he was well established, Zare worried about
going against the establishment. “It was very serious,” he
says. The risk is even greater for young professors seeking TEAM WORK
tenure, he notes.
In 2004, in response to the growing interest in interdiscipli- For institutions or programmes that have embraced
nary work — and the challenges that face those who attempt interdisciplinarity, the transition has not always been easy.
it — the US National Academies released a report called The most common mistake is underestimating the depth
Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. The authors advised of commitment and personal relationships needed for a
institutions to lower barriers, for example by making budgets successful interdisciplinary project, says Laura Meagher,
flexible so that costs could be shared across departments. a consultant based near St Andrews, UK, who coaches
The publication drew a large audience. It has been down- interdisciplinary teams. “You see people who think it’s not
loaded more than 7,600 times and had impact beyond US much more than stapling a bunch of CVs to the back of a
shores. At Durham University, UK, says physicist Tom proposal,” she says. “They don’t realize that it takes time to
McLeish, administrators referred to the report when they build a relationship.”
were forging a series of on-campus interdisciplinary centres. When the push for collaboration comes from the top, some
Around that time, McLeish was serving as pro-vice-chancel- of that focus on personal relationships could be lost — leav-
lor of research, and saw interdisciplinarity as a way to make ing the project to suffer, she says. The UK Energy Research
the small university shine on the world stage. He battled with Centre (UKERC) in London, which since 2004 has coordi-
department chairs who feared that the centres would reduce nated and carried out sustainable-energy research, learned
their budgets, and he worked to set up a promotion system how delicate interdisciplinary relationships can be, says Mark
that rewards investigators on large team grants in the same Winskel, a social and political scientist at the University of
way as those on single-investigator grants. The university Edinburgh who evaluated the centre’s first decade. Its initial
now has interdisciplinary centres on topics ranging from five-year phase went well, he says, and culminated in a key
resilience — both ecological and psychological — to the publication: Energy 2050, which synthesized the institution’s
history of medieval science. results and translated them into recommendations. But the
The interdisciplinary trend is also growing in Asia. In next five-year phase failed to produce a similar achievement.
2000, the National Natural Science Foundation of China Winskel surveyed members and found that changes in the
(NSFC) laid out a plan for interdisciplinary research, and UKERC’s structure designed to open it to a wider commu-
universities have launched several cross-cutting centres nity — for example by offering several rounds of fresh grants
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FEATURE NEWS
in the middle of phase two — had upset some established University in Providence, Rhode Island.
long-term relationships. “We became a more diverse com- As more institutions adopt new ways to organize research,
munity of scholars and disciplines,” he says. “But that also some are also trying to rethink their assessment processes,
means you become less cohesive.” The UKERC learned from says McLeish. In July, Veronica Strang at Durham and
the experience: its third phase, launched in May 2014, aims to McLeish released a report called Evaluating Interdisciplinary
provide more stability for collaborative relationships. Research, and he was surprised when academic societies and
Social scientists in particular often face that lack of funders flocked to learn more. “We didn’t anticipate that we’d
cohesion, says Thomas Heberlein, a social psychologist at the be launching this report into an atmosphere where everyone
University of Wisconsin–Madison. When funders emphasize wants to know this,” he says.
the societal impacts of the work they support, social scien- And the pace of change varies across the globe. In the
tists are often called in to assess the broader implications of a United States, the NIH ran a programme to stimulate inter-
project. But, he says, it is obvious — and insulting — when a disciplinary research from 2004 to 2012. It resulted in some
social scientist is asked to join a project as a way to tick a box, changes, such as starting to recognize multiple principal
without a true commitment to incorporating the discipline investigators on what had been considered single-inves-
into the project. tigator grants — a switch that removed a disincentive to
collaborate. Since then, the agency has not perceived a need
to follow up with any other incentives, noting that there are
SOCIAL STRUGGLE more than 4,000 active NIH-funded research projects that
bill themselves as interdisciplinary. “Our general sense is that
Several UK studies have found that social scientists are less interdisciplinary research has become a very standard way
likely than researchers in other disciplines to want to par- of doing science,” says Betsy Wilder, head of the NIH Office
ticipate in interdisciplinary projects. For Heberlein, who of Strategic Coordination. “It really pervades NIH funding.”
has long collaborated with ecologists and environmental In some other countries, the experiment has just begun.
scientists, one of the stumbling blocks is what he calls “the Chemist Ayyappanpillai Ajayaghosh, director of the National
hegemony of the natural sciences”. Those disciplines tend to Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology in
be held in higher esteem than more qualitative fields such Thiruvananthapuram, India, says that momentum is building
as the social sciences, and they are deemed more rigorous in his country to promote more interdisciplinary projects. In
by funders and researchers, he says. That imbalance leads to
frustration and undermines collaboration. Heberlein, whose
speciality is in conducting surveys of public opinions, says
that natural scientists often naively suggest that they can “YOU SEE PEOPLE WHO THINK IT’S NOT MUCH MORE
design and execute surveys themselves using an Internet
tool such as SurveyMonkey. Heberlein disagrees: “It’s really THAN STAPLING A BUNCH OF CVS TO THE BACK OF A
PROPOSAL. THEY DON’T REALIZE THAT IT TAKES TIME
hard to do the stuff we do,” he says. “Our measurements are
complicated.”
Lack of respect can run in many directions when different
kinds of researchers come together. Wood says that bio
engineers are always cautioned against having their grants
reviewed by panels of biologists, who may be dismissive of
TO BUILD A RELATIONSHIP.”
engineering research goals and measurements. But he has Japan, theoretical physicist Tetsuo Hatsuda left the University
also served on review panels in which engineers have recoiled of Tokyo in part because he felt that the boundaries between
at the limitations of clinical research. disciplines were too heavily enforced there. In 2013, he joined
As more researchers become involved with interdiscipli- the RIKEN research institute in Wako, Japan, and launched
nary work, the mutual suspicion has started to ease. There an interdisciplinary team of theoretical physicists, chemists
have also been some signs of success in the funding arena. and biologists to work out techniques that will accelerate
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, all three fields. He hopes that the effort will stimulate more
says that interdisciplinary proposals fare as well as, or slightly interdisciplinary work in the country. “Japan is a little behind
better than, more conventional applications. The European other countries,” he says. “Theoretical science is a good start-
Research Council, by contrast, has noted that interdiscipli- ing point because it is easy for us to interact.”
nary grant proposals on average do not fare as well in review Some 25 years after it opened, the Beckman Institute’s exper-
panels as projects that are narrower in scope. iment in interdisciplinary research has been a success, says
The atmosphere for publishing is also mixed. Interdiscipli- Brown. The centre continues to attract distinguished faculty
nary researchers have long complained that it is difficult to get members and large team grants — last year it won a research
their papers into top-tier disciplinary journals. Heberlein says contract worth up to $12.7 million from the federal govern-
that the rise of interdisciplinary journals has helped in his field, ment’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
but he worries about the standard of some of the papers they programme — even though competition for such money has
publish. And he questions the wisdom of training graduate increased as more universities build interdisciplinary teams.
students across disciplines before they have immersed them- And Brown bristles at the suggestion that the global
selves in the rigours of one area. “You’ve got to develop your push for interdisciplinarity might be a fad. “The answer is
disciplinary skills first,” he says. “The bad news is the quality of a resounding ‘no’,” he says. “Things have changed — now
this research is pretty bad and may be getting worse.” people focus on big problems, and if you go for a big problem
Many view the institutional push for interdisciplinar- you need to be interdisciplinary.” ■ SEE EDITORIAL P.289
ity as an experiment in progress. “The celebrations have
begun, but the actual data on what kind of difference this Heidi Ledford writes for Nature from Boston,
makes are not in,” says Scott Frickel, a sociologist at Brown Massachusetts.
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