The Life Sciences Center occupies the northern end of campus, next to the Remsen and Vail buildings of the Geisel School of Medicine. Fairchild, Steele and Wilder Halls make up their own physical sciences clique. Sudikoff and Moore Halls are just off the center of campus.
Though the departments’ physical separation may reinforce the illusion that the subjects taught and studied in those buildings are distinct from one another, in reality, it is often difficult to impose rigorous boundaries between physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, et cetera. Scientific knowledge flows back and forth between seemingly distinct disciplines. Even among scientists and engineers, these delineations are constantly revised, deconstructed or reinforced.
One of the best and most difficult aspects about being a pre-med is being required to take a number of science courses across disciplines. Chemistry taught me how to understand the reactions in organic chemistry, which allowed me to understand the processes of protein interactions in biochemistry, which helped me piece together the mechanisms of molecular diseases in my senior seminar. Physics taught me the basics of optics, which helped me see how corrective lenses could correct for myopia and hyperopia. Computer science taught me how to access and organize information, which enabled me to mobilize various online databases available for my biology research. Despite difficulties, I enjoyed taking classes outside my areas of comfort and expertise, and I now possess a broad base of valuable scientific knowledge.
One of my personal idols, chemist Paul Lauterbur, exemplifies the necessity of an intersectional approach. He famously said that all science is interdisciplinary. To prove his point, he underscored in his 2003 Nobel Laureate lecture that he, though a chemist, would be sharing the prize for physiology or medicine with a physicist. In his words, the formal categorization of scientific knowledge exists for administrative and didactic convenience rather than ontological reality.
In fact, this interdisciplinary nature can be observed in Lauterbur’s scientific contributions, which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging possible. He combined concepts from different fields to create a successful, novel technology.
Lauterbur’s career trajectory itself highlights the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to science. Lauterbur was observing a mouse tissue sampling study via NMR in a biology lab when he first devised the idea of imaging with NMR. He then consulted with local mathematicians to see whether his theories were feasible, and they validated his ideas. To test whether his theory could be realized through radiofrequency coils, he consulted a physics textbook, “The Principles of Nuclear Magnetism,” by Anatole Abragam. With this, he completed a series of experiments that confirmed his ideas. Lauterbur succeeded because he did not strictly categorize his work and was comfortable using ideas from other fields.
Following the publication of his work in “Nature,” Lauterbur invited several scientists from multiple disciplines to share data and collaborate on projects. Lauterbur could slip between chemistry, biology, mathematics and physics and combine many ideas from these fields. He could then encourage collaboration among various scientists and caught the attention of businesses to develop machines with tremendous applications in medicine. And while many approached him after his success to say that they or their mentors had come up with similar ideas in the past, Lauterbur distinguished himself from the rest by actually realizing his idea — thanks to this revolutionary mindset.
Many upper-level science courses, particularly in a field as broad as biology, require extensive knowledge of other disciplines. Fortunately, Dartmouth departments offer a number of opportunities that encourage cross-disciplinary thinking and application. In addition, many new exciting applications in the sciences are already creating interdisciplinary collaborations. All Dartmouth science majors should seek instruction outside of their own immediate majors to become more capable of linking seemingly disparate ideas together. We must remember that an interdisciplinary scientific education leads to innovation and success.
