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Scientific Collaboration Throughout History: Knowledge Networks with Weak Local Bridges

Throughout the development of biology as a science, there have been many instances of collaboration between genetic biologists, evolutionary biologists, and various other experts in the various disciplines. This collaboration of biologists pushed forward the field of biology gradually in the last couple centuries, but upon a further examination of the key developments of biology, we can frequently find the meddling contributions of physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. Typically, it might seem natural for other disciplines of scientists to be able to contribute to another field of science.

However, in my studies of biology, I’ve noticed that a disproportionately large amount of key discoveries in biology were not made by biologists: Rosalind Franklin, a skilled crystallographer, provided the key information that indicated DNA had a helical structure, which allowed Watson and Crick to piece together the chemical structure of DNA. Godfrey Harold Hardy, an English mathematician, provided a mathematical model of allele ratios in populations for his fellow cricket-player and geneticist Reginald Punnett, greatly advancing the ability of evolutionary biologists and geneticists to analyze populations. Marie Curie’s investigations into radioactivity set the foundation for radiometric dating, used regularly nowadays by evolutionary biologists to analyze earth’s life’s history. Following each non-biologists small, often-time simple contributions in, say, physics, discoveries in biology bloomed in unison. Therefore, this begs two questions: Why are so many major changes in biology brought about by discoveries in other disciplines of science, and why is it that with so many biologists tackling problems in biology, we do not find proportionally as many biologists making these abrupt contributions? An analysis of this situation using networks may provide a systematic way to consider this phenomenon.

Let’s set up the scientists as nodes in a network, where edges represent the exchange of information related to the scientist’s field of study. If we group the scientists based on their main field of study (biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics in this simplified representation), then it can be easily imagined that within each group, the biologists far more frequently exchange ideas about their studies, and inquire with one another about specific issues in their daily research. Each group’s members have strong connections with each other (due to the frequency of their interaction), and there are very few, if any strong connections between members of different groups.

A Network of Scientists

However, there at least exist some weak bonds in between the physicists and biologists, or the mathematicians and the chemists: take for example the friendship between Hardy and Punnett formed around cricket.  These weak, trivial relationships, are ironically the ones that lead to the greatest changes in the network of biologists. In Networks, we have learnt about the “Strength of Weak Ties” in terms of the weak, local bridges; from the perspective of all the biologists, many of the novel information and ideas within the networks of biologists is quickly exhausted, due to the frequency of their interactions with each other. This is similar to how in class we discussed that experimentally, it was determined that people did not often find jobs from their close friends, because those close friends already share a great amount of information, and are unlikely to offer any game-changing information after the friendship has existed for some time. The second part of this experiment showed that in fact, an individual found a job from those that he or she was weakly linked or acquainted to. This part of the analogy also applies to the scientific community; the weak ties between members of biology and members of physics, were the key connection in producing significant changes and new ideas, or “finding a job”. The weak tie essentially provided biologists with a window to access information they did not have access to previously, which was more likely to bring about abrupt changes than re-examining the information present within the biology network.

We often hear that science is collaborative, but perhaps it was not as readily apparent that the key collaborations of science are less likely to be between the members of a field of study, but rather between the members of very different fields of study. Although it is more intuitive that scientists in other fields may have something fresh to contribute to biology, without a Networks analysis it is harder to understand why the actual  biologists are not producing proportionally as many abrupt changes.

In terms of science’s future, perhaps this Networks analysis also suggests that in order to maximize the speed of progress, we should explore more and more of these weak local bridges between different fields of science. This has already started to happen, with the relatively recent interest in so-called interdisciplinary studies, and it is not even restricted solely to collaboration between different fields of science; game theory has been applied to quite some depth in evolutionary biology in the last couple decades. Regardless, a deliberate step towards interdisciplinary collaborations will undoubtedly accelerate the rate at which the borders of science can be pushed forward.

Disclaimer: I would like to be very clear that I am not claiming that non-biologists make the bulk of important discoveries in biology; instead, I am claiming that non-biologists are far more often involved in the ABRUPT introduction of ideas that lead to an explosion of ideas within biology. Although these explosions indicate a very high concentration of innovations in a short time period, they can still total a very insignificant number in the sum of all the gradual progress made by biologists working on the mysteries of biology.

Stories of Physicists and Mathematicians in Biology:

http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/dna_double_helix/readmore.html

http://www.genetics.org/content/179/3/1143.short

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html

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