Building Environments for Collaborative Science

Over the last few decades, evidence accumulated that understanding human well-being and health requires multiple perspectives. While biology, biochemistry, genetics, and microbiology remain cornerstones, focusing on individual humans isolated from their context seems increasingly myopic. Humans live in groups. Groups affect their members in myriad ways, including health.

Groups build social norms; those norms affect health-related behaviors. Over time, the norms evolve into ethical frameworks within a subpopulation. Strictures on what is proper and improper behavior are correlated with personal health.

At a macro-level, nation-states implement diverse health care delivery systems, often producing disparities in access to preventive care resources. These disparities tend to be a function of urbanicity and income. Understanding the mechanisms producing these differences challenges the assumption of a uniform human body. For example, traditional practices based on studies involving only male subjects are challenged.

As a small-ish research university, with a medical center within feet of professional schools and a college of arts and sciences, Georgetown has an advantage in assembling interdisciplinary teams to tackle unanswered questions involving human well-being.

Even domains of knowledge seemingly conceptually far away from the biomedical sciences may have relevance. Since ethical frameworks of subgroups affect health care delivery, the field of bioethics emerging out of philosophy is helpful. The growing field of the medical humanities has alerted practice to the power of patient narratives, which may reveal health attributes in a manner embedded in subcultures of a population. The lesson of empathy arising from careful observation and listening to these narratives appears to be a useful complement to the science underlying physical health.

There are many faculty in several Georgetown schools whose research focus is health outcomes. Some are social scientists; some are humanists, as befits this more holistic understanding of human health. The establishment of the new School of Health has defined a hub to which many of these faculty can be linked.

But most closely related to the biomedical sciences are the basic sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences — chemistry, physics, and biology. Admittedly, they often investigate phenomena quite distant from human well-being. However, repeatedly over time, it has been demonstrated that the basic sciences findings, with a bit of a lag, produce new applied knowledge, affecting practice in the biomedical domain.

For some years, funders have imagined a world in which more and more collaboration across fields within universities may inform the future of what we formerly thought of as solely the domain of medical schools. For example, the National Institutes of Health have recognized the role of the basic sciences as well as the social and behavioral sciences in unlocking advances in well-being.

But working across fields is always difficult. In this case, the difficulty is exacerbated. The different fields mentioned above lie in different positions in the pecking order of funding priorities. Because of this, the development of mutual respect within interdisciplinary teams often requires years of relationship building.

Georgetown has deliberately worked on all of the areas above, but perhaps most intentionally in the last year on building supportive environments for collaboration between the basic sciences and the biomedical sciences. The strategic thrust was motivated by the advantage of physical proximity of scientists in both domains, and proven payoffs of existing collaborations. It also was related to the aspiration to renew the Reiss building by remodeling floors devoted to collaborative scientific research.

Last year, a joint faculty committee of scientists from GUMC and the main campus deliberated on research thrusts that could enhance collaboration between the basic sciences and the biomedical sciences. First, they identified existing collaborations that were bearing fruit. Then, over several months they developed a set of ideas involving work ongoing on both campuses, which might be combined in new groups of collaborators.

The draft report was reviewed by the chairs of science departments on both campuses. New ideas were added. The next step is the identification of one or more of the ideas that might be further developed into a proposal for funding that would involve remodeling a floor of the Reiss building to house the new collaborative team.

Georgetown has all the ingredients to assemble effective interdisciplinary teams to tackle important biomedical problems. Efforts like these are the way forward.