Image: Illustration by Oliver Munday and Jason Arias
Nations are rivals in soccer and international relations, but science is a unifying force. Many of our biggest achievements seem to come from international collaborations. A team from 11 laboratories in nine countries identified the SARS coronavirus in 2003 with unprecedented speed. Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe. The world of science is getting flatter.
What has gone underappreciated in this trend is the effect on science itself and how science is actually done. It has become a cliché that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking—a chemist bringing insight to a discussion of a materials problem, a physicist sharing an intuition about a problem in biology, a biologist helping an engineer see how nature comes up with optimal solutions. Few realize how much science is energized when team members have different cultural approaches to problem solving. International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline.
I have seen this phenomenon at close quarters. For years I have collaborated with colleagues from Mexico and Germany. We see eye to eye on so many things. We like one another’s cuisine, hiking, and the mathematics and physics our research involves. When we began writing out equations on a chalkboard, though, our cultural differences became apparent.
When we first started out, our approaches seemed irreconcilable. The physics problems we work on—fluid suspensions of small particles—are hard. They encompass many unknowns, and the physics bumps up against many constraints and boundary conditions—rules that cannot be broken, like conservation of matter or the impassibility of a solid wall. While working on difficult equations, my Mexican cohorts wanted to relax the rules to make the mathematics more tractable and later put them back in. This set our German friends on edge. They kept reminding us of the constraints and the boundary conditions to make sure we did not stray too far. My American training left me somewhere in the middle: I worried about the constraints but was tentatively willing to relax them.
Over the years the creative clash of viewpoints bred success. The German-Mexican teams, along with some Americans, wound up solving challenging multibody hydrodynamics problems—the complicated mathematical descriptions of the way swarms of particles squeeze the fluid between them, explaining the flow behavior of pastes and slurries.
I first got a lesson in cross-cultural dynamics during a NATO postdoctoral fellowship in Paris in 1985. Working with French colleagues taught me a different way to simplify and clarify a physics problem. An appreciation for the beauty of the problem and the value of intuition might have led us to solutions more easily than the typical American approach: to attack the problem with loads of mathematical equations. Later in Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awardee, I found that approaching an experimental problem with a deliberate, tactical and strategic way reduced the need for trial and error.
The power of this diversity of thought comes alive in international conferences where there is an opportunity to listen, ask questions, think about problems, confer with and critique one another, and continue the dialogue after the meeting is over.
New institutions have sprung up to take advantage of the synergies in multinational collaborations. Singapore has created an intensely international science scene, where talent converges to contribute and compete to form some of the best research teams in the world. In December, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology graduated its second cohort of men and women receiving master’s degrees in science and engineering, who hail from Saudi Arabia, China, Mexico, the U.S. and 29 other countries. Labs, institutes and universities are hubs that gather the best scientists to tackle the hardest problems.
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7 Comments
Add CommentMs Gast suggests "the typical American approach: to attack the problem with loads of mathematical equations". Really? How is that typical, if other writers suggest that Americans are terrible at math? Or is her opinion based on the cloistered world of academia?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently wrote a piece for our local Porsche Club newsletter which was timely, and supports your real conclusion that it takes many skills to achieve truly remarkable things. If interested, see:
www.holzerent.com/pages/pca82.doc
for the Word format download. You will find many others I have written there as well, published as "The Alternative Line". There won't be many equations ;-)
I recognize that few readers of Scientific American will ever be described as "typical", and I have no real numeric data to dispute your contention. But I have a "feeling" you are far from accurate in THAT.
Joe Holzer
I totally agree that a diverse view to solving problems is best. I saw this first hand in my last 20 years working in the network tech arena. I started out as the only woman in our group, and consistently saw a different approach to investigating a problem. As more women joined our group, this different view became more obvious to all of us. This is a different spin than Ms. Gast's diversity, but does point out the similar benefits.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this?????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this99.95 of science is international and has been for 150 years.. It's not about the 'big stuff' but tens of thousands of individuals doing research in their niches that few are aware of.
I've been in geology for over 35 years and have never thought of 'borders'.
Nowadays,it has been increasingly important for scientists in different areas to work for a common task. We have known that the sequencing of genome took place as a global task for scientists with different nationalities to accomplish including those in the U.S.A, China, Japan, and etc. So, what you have proposed is what I really what want to express.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is not yet an example of "our biggest achievements", is it? Or are you considering that conducting enormous projects with many thousands of employees and a budget of billions of Euros to be a major achievement by itself?
I might mention that in past years NASA achieved more with less international collaboration that CERN has with the LHC. I'm sure CERN will catch up, given enough time and money...
Certainly diverse perspectives are useful in the cases where enormous organizations are necessary to conduct the business of science, but in such cases I think its the effective operation of the organization that is the most critical factor in determining its success. Of course, such large organizations have specialized public relations groups that strive to ensure that their achievements are recognized.
On the other hand, I've heard that the days of the independent contributor, such as Newton, Darwin or Einstein are over. Since their are so many large organization engaged in the business of science, and they tend to promote their own interests, it's unlikely that individuals would be allowed to make any really revolutionary contributions. All hail the little guy who just does his little job in a big organization!
Back to the point of this article, international collaborations allow public relations groups to incorporate more of the world's population in the celebration of organizational success - and the search for continued funding sources...
Re jtdwyer comments; I have yet to hear of any organization innovating anything. It is done by a person with some insight, and often requires a thick skin to survive the naysayers. That they collaborate is no question in the internet age, mostly due to the ABILITY to share in real time. But as the IBM team would tell you about "Watson", the Jeopardy victor, even that level of talent has no creative ability. Same for "organizations". Einsteins are still essential.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, I agree with you wholeheartedly!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy comments were an unsuccessful attempt to facetiously express what I think is a consensus view I've often heard from primarily non-contributors in large organizations...
Thanks!