Bioinformatics and Systems Biology: Multidisciplinary scientists versus Interdisciplinary scientist

Same old wine now in new bottle, a debate which bioinformatics community has followed for the years now became a major agenda for systems biology community as well. During recent Systems Biology Inter-DTC Conference at University of Manchester Systems Biology Centre, there was a special session on the subject “can scientists be multidisciplinary?”. Steve Checkley has written andetailed opinion about this secession and following debate. Current status of systems biology is quite similar what we have seen 5 year back in bioinformatics community, both have very similar fundamental issues. Part of the problem is interchangeable definitions of interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity. According to Wikipedia, multidisciplinarity is defined as

Multidisciplinarity is the act of joining together two or more disciplines without integration. Each discipline yields discipline specific results while any integration would be left to a third party observer. An example of multidisciplinarity would be a panel presentation on the many facets of the AIDS pandemic (medicine, politics, epidemiology) in which each section is given as a stand-alone presentation.
A multidisciplinary community or project is made up of people from different disciplines and professions who are engaged in working together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is how well can the challenge be decomposed into nearly separable subparts, and then addressed via the distributed knowledge in the community or project team. The lack of shared vocabulary between people and communication overhead is an additional challenge in these communities and projects. However, if similar challenges of a particular type need to be repeatedly addressed, and each challenge can be properly decomposed, a multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally efficient and effective. A multidisciplinary person is a person with degrees from two or more academic disciplines, so one person can take the place of two or more people in a multidisciplinary community or project team. Over time, multidisciplinary work does not typically lead to an increase nor a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.

while interdisciplinarity can be described as

"Interdisciplinarity" in referring to an approach to organizing intellectual inquiry is an evolving field, and stable, consensus definitions are not yet established for some subordinate or closely related fields.
An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is what new knowledge (of an academic discipline nature), which is outside the existing disciplines, is required to address the challenge. Aspects of the challenge cannot be addressed easily with existing distributed knowledge, and new knowledge becomes a primary subgoal of addressing the common challenge. The nature of the challenge, either its scale or complexity, requires that many people have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area. An interdisciplinarary person is a person with degrees from one or more academic disciplines with additional interactional expertise in one or more additional academic disciplines, and new knowledge that is claimed by more than one discipline. Over time, interdisciplinary work can lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.

Unlike multidisciplinarity which brings two or more disciplines together without any integration with each discipline approaching the problem from their own perspective, interdisciplinarity utilizes an integrated approach to solve those problems. Both multidisciplinary co-operation and interdisciplinary integration have same intent- providing practical solutions to practical problems either confined in the separateness of unidisciplinarity or inherent in present conditions of specialization. Indeed multidisciplinary co-operation has been always favored over interdisciplinary integration without very strong reasons. For example pharmaceutical companies have always preferred multidisciplinary team of computer scientist and biologist rather than recruiting interdisciplinary bioinformaticians. Although interdisciplinarity scientists are highly trained in several disciplines, but in general they are not considered as specialist for any of them. In case of systems biology, as Steve report, pharmaceutical companies want to recruit hard core mathematicians rather than trained systems biologist for very same argument that multidisciplinary team of mathematicians and biologist can have a better impact on the research. No doubt interdisciplinary trained scientist are good for solving problems, but they can not be hired for implementing solutions which require more than interdisciplinary approach or let say specialist. Contrary to that there is nothing which stops a trained specialist to be a generalist or interdisciplinary. Existing R&D environment in both academic and industry is preoccupied and optimized for the specialist as leading role while interdisciplinary trained scientist have their secondary roles. Ironically road to interdisciplinarity is one way or it is too early to predict that. At the end it does not matter if you are specialist or interdisciplinary, success depends on the passion to do the right things on right time, whatever you do be at best you will be always successful. It will be premature to say that interdisciplinary scientist will not get their place in a specialist world, even interdisciplinary scientist will turn into specialist some day. Just now pharmaceutical companies are playing safe as systems biology is an emerging discipline but is yet to prove itself.