Organize Science Around Big Questions

All of science could be way more legible

You don’t care about the box we call biology. No one cares about the box; people care about what’s inside. But nearly everyone cares about life and death. The near universality of the question “how can I live a longer and healthier life” explains facts like the US federal government spending as much on health research as on all other non-defense categories combined. Many people (perhaps including you) care about other questions too like: “What is life and how did it originate?” And ”How can we engineer living organisms?” Dig deeper and you’ll find thousands of small, weird questions like “why do emus always keep one foot on the ground when they run,” each with a few diehard fans.

More generally, sometimes people want the technologies developed downstream of scientific research and sometimes they want to satisfy their innate curiosity and sometimes they just want more pandas. They never just want more biologists. Biologists are a means to an end and that end is answering questions. The problem is that very few of those questions fit neatly in biology departments.

This challenge is universal across scientific disciplines. Get beneath the surface of any great question like “What is out there beyond Earth?” or “What are all the substances that can exist and how do we make them?” and you’ll quickly find that they’re a poor fit for any formal discipline. A typical solution to this problem is “interdisciplinary research,” but this is always bad. It means more time and effort spent communicating across disciplinary and institutional cultures and probably extra layers of bureaucracy as well. Interdisciplinarity is the cost of setting up the wrong disciplines in the first place.

Many science communication, organization and funding challenges are also the result of the weird, historically contingent set of disciplines we unquestioningly accept. Physics departments spend a lot of time explaining what they do and why they exist. Would the department of “what are the fundamental rules that govern the universe” need to do the same? Would it need to spend a year justifying to deans why it had to hire a mechanical engineer? Would it need multi-page motivation sections in its grant proposals? Regardless, it should consider spinning off the department of “where did the universe come from?” because that’s a very different question and different people care about it!

Some of these disciplinary boundaries follow from the different skills and aptitudes needed from practitioners. Electrical and mechanical engineers are not interchangeable! However, failure to clearly articulate the questions that the research arms of these disciplines are answering can lead to unproductive searches for novel methods instead of improved outcomes. The world doesn’t need another working fluid for organic Rankine cycles unless there’s some reason to believe that it could lead to better conversion of waste heat to electricity.

We noted in an earlier post that NASA is extraordinarily popular. We think a major cause of this is that NASA is well aligned to a clear and popular question: “What is in outer space and how can we go there?”

So much more of science could be this popular! And all of science could be way more legible. If, for example, your question is “Do sharks intentionally rub their parasites off on manta rays?” (apparently, they do) then framing your research around that question immediately makes it clear what you’re looking at and makes it easy to tie your small question to your larger question “how can we stop mantas from going extinct?” which in turn ties up to “how can humanity be good stewards of the earth?” The linked preprint does a good job of this despite having to couch everything in formal language and the straightjacket structure of a scientific paper, but we wish the authors could throw off these shackles and talk about their work in terms folks actually care about.

To do that, we’d need a department of “how can humanity be good stewards of the earth?” that could encompass both marine biology, whatever discipline can build a working definition of “good” for this purpose, and a bunch of other fields besides. If you’re a philosopher (we need that definition of “good”) who wants more funding you should love this reframing of science. Get on that charismatic megafauna gravy train and don’t look back! You might think we’re joking but we’re not. Science is done by people for people. We should structure our work to give the people what they want and frame it in a way they can understand.