A Conference on Quantitative Biology
I went to part of a recent conference, “New Directions in Quantitative Biology“, this past weekend, which was pretty neat. The talks I enjoyed the most (of the ones I attended) were Celeste Nelson’s talk on investigating branching growth in 3D cell cultures, Claire Tomlin’s talk on using control theory to decode the hair patterning on Drosophila wings, and Ron Weiss’ talk on synthetic biology.
The overall theme of the conference was on research that integrates mathematical and physical methods and understanding into traditional biological concepts. One of the problems with this mesh of topics is that both traditional biologists and traditional physicists and engineers populate the audience, which means that some of the mathematics will inevitably be over the heads of some of the audience, while some of the biology will be cryptic and inexplicable to much of the audience as well. I think the speaker who balanced the two the best was Claire Tomlin, who managed to present her engineering modeling work without filling slides with equations; she chose to focus on the assumptions, the process of choosing the appropriate implementation of the model, and the results of her modeling, and how the simulations both explained and contributed to the fundamental biological research on fly development. Not only were they able to show that Jeff Axelrod’s autoregulation model was sufficient to explain the hair patterning in Drosophila, but they also showed that the biological behavior “disproving” the model actually supported it, as they were predicted and (nonintuitively) consistent with the simulations. Finally, the model predicted new phenomena that was then later independently confirmed by other labs. The talk was really beautiful work, and is summarized in this paper:
Amonlirdviman et al. (2005) Science 307, 423-426 (PDF)
Another problem with these interdisciplinary talks (or a benefit, to see it from another direction), is that it’s very possible that one side of the “cultural divide” will ignore or overlook something that’s very obvious to the other side, which makes for much awkwardness. When one physicist gave a talk about how certain cell movement dynamics indicated that microtubules are buckling, a biologist raised the question, “Well, what if this behavior is because of de-polymerization of the microtubule?” The physicist sort of stammered, “Well…well, ah, I guess it could be de-polymerization.” The silence in the audience was very awkward for a few moments, before another audience member helped the physicist rationalize mechanical buckling as the explanation instead of de-polymerization. It reminded me of another anecdote from around here: there was one physicist who worked hard for a year on the dynamics of DNA unzipping, and after analyzing many computer simulations and mathematical models, finally concluded that AT base pairs unzip faster than GC base pairs. A biologist quipped, “My four-year-old granddaughter could have told you that, and it wouldn’t have taken you a post-doc and one year.”
The potential “benefit” from these interactions, of course, is that if the biologists and physicists didn’t get together and talk at conferences like these, both sides would have gone about their merry way, ignorant of spuriousness of some of their efforts and results. Still, it probably would have been better that the biologists and physicists had interacted earlier in order to stave off too much wasted effort. One graduate student who was a teaching fellow (a.k.a. TA) for one of my classes does interdisciplinary work in both theory and wetlab biology, but he is a part of both a computational biology lab as well as a traditional biology lab, because only the theorists who really work and live on theory can really do a good critique of theory work, and only the biologists who do lab-work full-time can tell what are good and bad experiments. Each side knows the nuances of their own field that the other side wouldn’t know, and the grad student gets the benefit of both sides by having one foot in each lab.
I’ve heard that graduate students with more than one advisor are a rare bunch, but I wonder if it will become more and more common, now that interdisciplinary research is really starting to take off in a huge way. Maybe even I will consider it as an option in the next year or two.
