Hybrid Vigor

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Denise Caruso

I'm pleased to be writing an essay for Sterling's iconoclastic guest issue of Whole Earth for many reasons, but one that I'll share is its connection with Stewart Brand, who founded this publication.

Stewart is a legend for many things, including his uncanny ability to bestow upon projects the perfect name, and I'm happy to say that he's responsible for ours. When I told him what I was up to a year ago--creating a nonprofit to encourage researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries--he immediately declared, "Oh, you should call it `Hybrid Vigor.'" And so I did.

The biological term for which Stewart named the Hybrid Vigor Institute describes the good juju that happens at the edges of a field when pollen from wild plants mingles with the cultivated ones, thereby increasing the strength and yield of the crops. (And, yes, we know it's an imprecise metaphor, please don't write and lecture us about it.) Hybrid vigor is also responsible for the rude health and longevity of crossbred animals (which led Stewart to add, "You could also just call it `Mutt'").

Despite the fact that our intention is, in part, to produce some vigorous mutts from today's blue-blood academic stock, I want to make it clear that we are not trying to abolish disciplines such as biology or physics, sociology, or whichever your favorite may be. We love disciplines.

In fact, if you think of disciplines as tools for producing knowledge, which they certainly are (and which qualifies them for inclusion in this review, historically a catalog of tools), then disciplinary study--primarily manifested by academic departments in universities--has pick-and-shoveled an enormous pile of precious metal from the hard stone mountain of the formerly unknown and unknowable.

But even with all the gazillions of discoveries large and small that researchers have eked out, and as much as they might want to make it so, complex understanding cannot be mined with the same brute force as a discovery; picks and shovels can only yield the next chunk of raw gold, not a fully formed grail.

Disciplines are great for discovering cell proteins, for example, but not for preventing cancer. Or for measuring the impact of methane in cow manure on the ozone layer, but not for stopping the planet from overheating. Solutions to problems of that magnitude--real problems that we need great minds to solve--take the kind of complex understanding that can only come from people of many disciplinary tribes coming together in peace to make it happen.

The limits of disciplinary study are not a big secret, or even anything new; the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries to give new perspective to stalled research agendas, and/or to more effectively solve real-world problems, has been widely accepted for decades--by great names in science from Norbert Wiener, Werner Heisenberg, and Thomas Kuhn, to more recent practitioners such as E.O. Wilson and Leroy Hood.

More practically, Rita Colwell, the director of the National Science Foundation--the American federal agency responsible for spending $3.3 billion on research projects annually--has declared interdisciplinarity to be a critical component in NSF funding decisions.

Nor are the shortcomings of disciplinary science surprising to mere mortals, who often have cause to marvel at the fact that they can go to several different medical specialists about the same problem, for example, and nary a one knows anything of the others' work--or if they know it, has anything but disdain for it.

But most researchers, and particularly "hard" scientists who have often dedicated their lives to studying the most remarkably arcane arcana, often have no intuitive sense of the wisdom of learning what other smart people are doing. For them, when higher water floats more boats, it's just harder to get out of the harbor.

So although it's kind of silly in light of proven benefits, it's not terribly surprising that hardly anyone actually practices interdisciplinarity, even though so many claim to.

Particularly it's not surprising because everything in today's university system works against it: Tenure is granted on the basis of specialization and achievement in a chosen discipline. The journals with clout, where you absolutely must publish to be considered for tenure, are all relentlessly disciplinary. The all-important departmental funding--and often individual project funding--is largely based on disciplinary achievement.

So there is no reward structure for crossing disciplines, either financially or professionally. In fact, you are often punished if you look outside your discipline for inspiration or, God forbid, for research partners; you're regarded as not "serious" about your work.

Then there are the personal barriers to practicing interdisciplinarity, the psychological issues of trust and fear and the marked distaste that most disciplinarians have for living with the kind of ambiguity that interdisciplinary work presents, not to mention the lack of a common language between disciplines.