Below, John Wilbanks answers the second of our three questions.
Cross-disciplinary work is where the big stuff happens. Watson and Crick were in their own way cross-disciplinary (bringing together the phage and the chemical work of each). Climate change is one very obvious place where the work must be cross-disciplinary. You have a dizzying sea of fields from hydrology and earth sciences, to geospatial and weather, to economics and political science that need to be integrated to make good decisions, and understand the risk of bad ones. Batteries also strike me as a place ripe for two geniuses from different fields to make a real breakthrough--energy storage needs a quantum leap forward.
But in a lot of places I feel it will be the emergence of people who don't think of themselves as cross-disciplinary in the traditional sense. DIY biologists don't think about cross-disciplinarity, they just want to hack--and their work skates across at least five disciplines of traditional biology and engineering!
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No, DIY biology doesn't think about cross-disciplinary stuff, or impact factor, or tenure, or grant funding. That frees it to do what it wants how it wants with the resources at hand, and that is why it is awesome.
Hi Toaster,
What are some examples of DIY biologists? I can see how the Critical Art Ensemble (who I mentioned a few posts back) represent DIY biotech but what about biology? I'd love some links or examples to investigate.