The Future of Natural Science Departments

In the natural sciences the primary organization is the department. It is in a department that a professor holds tenure, through departments that classes are funded from the administration, and from departments that teaching assistantships are granted. To a certain extent departments must compete with eachother for the limited resources of the university. These factors have fostered a division of research into separate domains with boundaries somewhat determined by the departments.

This sort of system worked fine when the boundaries between the various disciplines were very real in terms of the kinds of research that could be done, but now perhaps the boundaries are somewhat artificial. For example, forty years ago genetics and physical chemistry had a very real separation between them in terms of the types of research being done. Today one speaks of mutations in terms of the physical chemist, and the boundary between the two is much more blurred. SImilarly the solid state physicist and botanist must speak a common language when discussing photosynthesis.

The answers to wome of the most basic questions in the life sciences will require an interdisciplinary approach, but the underlying administative organization is a produce of an era when the disciplines existed independently of one another.

Hence there exists the curious circumstance of having great amounts of effort going into the description of a phenomena without too much effort going into the basis of cells, i.e., light to chemical energy, chemical energy to forces, and so on. The physiologists have done a marvelous job of describing these transductions, but only together with the physical chemist and physicist can the basis of these transductions be elucidated.

The present organization tends to discourage interdisciplinary researcy, by the channeling of funding through departments.

The interdisciplinary groups are a good start to tackle these multidiscipline problems, but these groups have no real autonomy in the sense that all the group professors are required to to have an appointment to a department, and the groups recieve no funding from the university.

At the present time the various disciplines are becoming fused in some areas with new understanding, and this trend will accelerate in the future. It is imperative that the university respond to this change. Courses should be offered on a graduate level which integrate the most important concepts from the various departments. This would prepare the graduate student to deal with interdisciplinary problems, the kind of problems that will play an increasing role in future research.