I had one interesting thought about the Seed dinner that I've been wanting write about for a while - the isolation of biomedical sciences from the rest of the scientific academic community. This fact was apparent at the Seed dinner - of the dozen people from Harvard or MIT, I was the sole representative from the Longwood campus. For those of you that are not familiar with Harvard, the Biomedical Sciences are all located in Boston's Longwood area, which is a stone throw away from Fenway Park. With all its hospitals and research centers, the Longwood campus is about the size of Harvard main campus.
This estrangement of the biomedical community is an aspect of the whole academic scene that can be frustrating for biomedical researchers. I personally know many postdocs that are trying to get positions at research centers that integrate the biomedical science departments with the rest of the institution. Intuitively, many in the biomedical community have felt the need to do something about this situation. About a decade ago there was a big push for "interdisciplinary studies". Now with Big Biology, Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology there is a second push for more mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists to enter biology. But it seems to me that the biggest barrier at some institutions is purely geographical.
Just a thought ...
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Something I've noticed as well in the places I've been. I did my undergrad at Yale, and the biology department and the school of medicine were at completely opposite ends of the campus. Here at U of Iowa, Biology is downtown with most of the rest of the "arts and sciences," while many of us medical people are "across the river" at the hospital complex, or off in another town (for example, I need to take a car or bus to my lab from either the hospital or the downtown part of campus). Makes it difficult to figure out who's doing what and where, and makes it practically impossible to keep track of interesting seminars.
Yeah I wonder what % of institutions of highe learning, have their life science departments segregated from their main campus.
It was bad at UMN-Twin Cities too. The medical school and microbiology department office was in Minneapolis, but the College of Biological Sciences, along with half the micro faculty when I got there, was in St. Paul. I did my Ph.D. in Minneapolis, then moved to St. Paul for my first post-doc.
It definitely was a sore point among the faculty in the department, especially when we had departmental seminars. The students working in St. Paul would only come over when it was someone their lab invited, because it was such a pain. For a while, they set up a remote camera at a classroom on the other campus, but it was way too wierd...Good times!
An additional impediment to jumping into interdisciplinarity is career portability later. What if the cool multidisciplined approach you take on in that postdoc or first academic job makes it hard for other prospective employers to figure out whether you're really a biologist or a chemist or a computer modeler or ... ? Especially if you're starting someplace with a low tenuring rate, or if you're managing a two-body problem, being able to market yourself as not-too-specialized is pretty important.
I was thinking of writing something poetical, but I don't have the inspiration at the moment. However...
a) systems bio and so forth will never be more than a small (though important) part of the great quest to treat and cure disease. As such, the need for interdisciplinary teams (with math people, for example) while real, is somewhat exagerated. There's room at MIT and Harvard for places like the Broad, but not the whole LMA.
b) Lets be honest - researchers at the LMA aren't isolated. It's not next to the schools, but the LMA is likely the largest concentration of biomedical researchers outside of the NIH, with perhaps a higher concentration of physicians to put that research into practice. And bazillions of talks per day, and relatively easy access to undergrads.
Yes yes yes. LMA (Longwood Medical Area) is great. blah blah blah. But life can become boring if you have no one outside the biomedical sciences to call your colleague. The Seed dinner was a good chance to meet some of these collegues that are involved in a different realm of the science universe. Not that I don't meet other academics (you can't drive a car in to Cambridge without running them over!) But you need that type interdisciplinary interaction to keep the stimulation high ... to get those neurons devoted to divergent thinking firing.