Emergent properties

Inception

Welcome to Emergent Properties! We are a small group of friends and MD-PhD program classmates who love having nerdy, cross-disciplinary discussions that straddle the scientific and clinical worlds. In this opening blog post, we hope to convey our motivations and passion for this project, and types of topics and articles you can expect to see from us.

When we first started in 2017, we were truly undifferentiated, and our days were filled with exciting lectures, research talks, and lab rotations. We’d spend hours over dinner and drinks discussing cool ideas, new discoveries, and proposing experiments. Our evening meet-ups and discussions were magical, embodying for us what Nobel Laureate François Jacob called “night science,” where the boundary between reality and imagination become blurred: a “workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out.” But each step we took (choosing labs, completing thesis projects, finishing clinical rotations) was “lineage-defining,” pushing us towards specializing in our respective domains. We found ourselves becoming deeper but more narrow in our thinking, wary of the risks, pitfalls, and costs of new ideas and innovations. We felt ourselves facing the expert’s dilemma, where the costs of stepping outside our expertise felt increasingly high, despite an overarching goal of our MD-PhD program being to inhabit these interdisciplinary spaces.

Just as individual differentiated cells do not function in isolation but instead rely on a choreographed dance across our bodies, science works best when we differentiated scientists and clinicians work together. And just as the most exciting discussions we’ve had were those where we danced across multiple facets of biology and medicine, we are confident that the best ideas are those that combine the shared knowledge and expertise from multiple areas of inquiry.

Multidimensionality

How do we most effectively bring together people with different perspectives and expertises? For instance, consider a project in which an experimental scientist conceives, designs, and performs experiments, with the data then handed to a computational biologist for analysis. Though technically an interdisciplinary project, we do not believe this yields a synergistic benefit where the whole emerges greater than the sum of its individual parts.

We strongly believe that in order to generate something beyond what any one individual could create, people with distinct perspectives and expertises must be involved in brainstorming and idea generation from the beginning. We will refer to this idea as “multidimensionality” to emphasize the integration to a whole, and to contrast against the more superficial “interdisciplinary” illustrated above. The Bell labs, for example, famously grouped scientists and experts from different fields into structures forcing collaboration and discussion from early in the ideation process, leading to tremendous scientific discovery and engineering accomplishments that have led to world-changing innovations including the transistor, information theory, solar cells, lasers, and the Unix operating system (see The Idea Factory).

With the exponential growth in scientific discoveries and the dizzying rate of new information and data in the digital age, the investment needed to make meaningful contributions renders it intractable to become expert in more than a handful of areas. But just as our cells benefit from each other’s unique specializations (e.g. the kidneys’ regulation of electrolytes, or the pancreas’s production of insulin), our hope is that discussions like those we hope to synthesize in this blog can counteract this push to silo ourselves. Our goal is to nucleate multidimensionality in each of us, giving us as a group the ability to approach new classes of questions or solutions while retaining the unique perspectives of our own fields.

Synthesis

While our background and interests are different on the surface, underneath we are united by a common love for science, discovery, and spending time with each other. Since first meeting almost a decade ago, we have become busier with life and more differentiated in our diverse range of fields and disciplines, but with these posts we hope to capture the magic of the undifferentiated scientific discussion and the joy of intellectual company that first brought us together. This endeavour is aided by our close friendship and our willingness to debate topics from the broadest field-defining work to the minutiae of detailed discoveries. We hope to create an environment for emergent properties from our discussions, where the takeaways are greater than the sum of the parts any of us brought.

From a practical perspective, we will attempt to publish an article on approximately a monthly basis, though these articles will be of varying length and format. In doing so, we aim to propagate speculative scientific thought - reflecting and synthesizing the literature rather than formally reviewing. As Ramón y Cajal wrote in his book Advice for a Young Investigator, “It is not sufficient to examine; it is also necessary to observe and reflect: we should infuse the things we observe with the intensity of our emotions and with a deep sense of affinity. We should make them our own where the heart is concerned, as well as in an intellectual sense.” We hope to use our hearts (and perhaps sometimes our brains) to derive these “emergent properties.”