“Certainly these developments make this an exciting time to be a participant in, or even an observer of, the scientific enterprise. ”
My edition of The Basic Works of Aristotle presents in a single volume essentially all that was known about physics, zoology, astronomy, logic and political science, and ethics and metaphysics, circa 350 BC. At least in the West, it would take another 2,200 years or so before scientific knowledge was sufficiently advanced to warrant being divided up among the academic specialties we recognize today.
But no sooner had specialization reached that point than specialists began to explore the possibilities of convergence. Human knowledge could never again be captured in a single volume—it was hard enough to treat any single discipline adequately in such a small space—but in the first decades of the 20th century, physicists began to seek their grand unified theory of everything. In the 1940s, physics would make common cause with biology, by which time the geneticists and the organismic/evolutionary researchers within biology had already arrived at their Modern Synthesis.
Less than 20 years later, Richard Feynman fired a shot across everyone’s bow with his “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” speech in which he foresaw computation and manipulation of information in that submicroscopic scale. It had not escaped his notice that biology had already mastered this art of writing small in the form of DNA transcription, and thus a wormhole existed to link computational devices and living systems.
In this issue of TJOLS, we explore some of the ways biomedical researchers today are working to dissolve the boundaries that still exist between medicine and engineering, as well as among physical matter, living matter, and information. One step is for the researchers themselves to dissolve the political, professional, and institutional boundaries that have separated them.
A pioneer in this convergent approach to biomedical research and education is the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), which we examine in “Hands-On Medicine” (p. 36). Another such institution is QB3, whose director, Reg Kelly, we profile in “The Smiling Heretic” (p. 44). Kelly, whose career trajectory went from physics, to molecular biology, to neuroscience, is living proof that the boundaries and categories we impose on science and technology are intellectual constructs rather than aspects of the empirical world.
Other researchers have moved from fields such as developmental biology into complexity science, where biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and even economists work to formulate the latest iteration of a “theory of everything.”
Meanwhile, methodological advances such as fMRI have helped to spur the growth of entirely new “interdisciplinary disciplines” such as behavioral neuroscience, in which social and biological psychologists work with neuroscientists and specialists in imaging in order to elucidate questions they had once pursued independently, or had never been able to ask.
The theme of our article on HST is the expansion of convergence to include the dissolution of global boundaries, as well. As the Harvard-MIT program increases its involvement in India, and as likeminded institutions such as the University of California’s Calit2 develop technologies to make collaboration around the globe as easy as talking across a conference table, the opportunities for cross fertilization of ideas expand exponentially. Will the end result be what E. O. Wilson calls “consilience,” the merger of all knowledge, Aristotle-style, back into a single category? Will it yield what Kevin Kelly calls “hive mind,” Samuel Beckett’s “enough,” or some ultimate revelation matching the Dravidian “silence at the heart of form?”
Stay tuned. Certainly these developments make this an exciting time to be a participant in, or even an observer of, the scientific enterprise.