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I'm delighted to be able to talk to you today about interdisciplinary training — something that I've been interested in for some time. In fact, interdisciplinary research training -- and the possibility of this very committee -- were among the topics that NIMH Director Steve Hyman and I discussed at our first meeting in the months even before he was officially on board.

What I'd like to do today is talk about some of the broader issues involved in interdisciplinary training for behavioral scientists.

The world I work in is a mix of science policy makers on the Hill, federal research agency administrators, and scientists themselves. From this vantage point, I can tell you that there's been a major shift in the way people see interdisciplinary research. Increasingly, it is synonymous with ‘cutting-edge.' What once may have been viewed as fringe is now seen as the stuff on the frontiers of science.

But this shift in culture has not occurred to the same extent in our core scientific institutions -- the disciplinary departments of our research universities. So, certain academics are doing more interdisciplinary research, but it's taking place in isolated pockets, and by those who are considered to be trail blazing pioneers by some or wasting their careers by others. The challenge for federal research agencies, for universities, and for the disciplines themselves, is to come up with ways to take the risk out of exploring these new worlds so that people can put their energy into research and not into overcoming institutional barriers that discourage all but the most adventurous. Now I'm not sure you have to fix all of that — at least not today. Your role in promoting interdisciplinary training as more mainstream — just one part of that — is going to be hard enough.

Let me now move to one of the barriers to be faced in behavior/biology interdisciplinary training. It is the artificial separation of biology and behavior. NIDA Director (and former NIMH Acting Director), Psychologist Alan Leshner, has a sign on his office wall proclaiming "Decartes is Dead!" I would extend that to most distinctions between biology and behavior. The behavioral side of an individual is inexorably linked to the biological side. Still, most molecular or biological scientists I know, including many in NIH leadership don't view it that way.

I often hear outright astonishment from my biological colleagues after they hear a talk on something like the impact of learning on brain structure, or the way genes work to allow a child to live within his or her environment, or some new finding about the biological basis of emotion, or information about electrical brain activity associated with changes in thinking. With more understanding, new worlds open up to them, worlds of human functioning that involve true partnership between behavior and biology — not just with one as handmaiden to the other, as too often was the extent to which even the farsighted biologist of the past was willing to go.

Don't get me wrong. This partnership between biology and behavior doesn't mean that every researcher studying behavior needs to include some core biological component -- and I'll say more about that later. It does mean that, ultimately there needs to be a reconciliation between purely behavioral explanations of individual events and purely biological explanations. We are at the beginning of that process now, but there is so much farther to go. And the reconciliation isn't just between biologists and psychologists. Let me relate a brief story to make the point.

APS was commissioned by NSF to convene a workshop that addressed where basic science in psychology was going. We gathered a dozen or so distinguished behavioral researchers from a variety of sub-areas. At one break, I was sitting with Duncan Luce, one of our most prominent cognitive/mathematical psychologists, and Daniel Schacter, a leading cognitive psychologist cum neuroscientist. Now Duncan is very theoretical, and uses mathematical modeling to explain thinking and reasoning. Dan is doing some very interesting things these days using neuroimaging to study memory. In my most naive manner, I asked whether there was any sense that someone could start looking at the neurobiology of what Duncan was studying or whether the behavioral phenomena that Dan was looking at could be placed in the context of Duncan's theoretical sophistication. Both looked at me in amazement that anyone could ask something like that. What I heard from both, without the slightest hint of defensiveness, was a kind of "never the twain shall meet" response — at least, they said, the twain shan't meet for the foreseeable future.

This committee is charged with suggesting training mechanisms so that, someday, that twain shall meet. So how to do this? How to create the next generation of Dan Schacters or how to let more neuroscience-y Duncan Luce's loose? One strategy is to ask the current crop of researchers -- and this may include people like Dan -- whose own work spans different disciplines. In fact, I recall in those early conversations with Hyman, we agreed that what would be wonderful would be a system to create the next generation's version of Mike Posner or Jim McGaugh or this committee's own Dick Thompson. So why not ask them what they think should qualitatively change in training the next crop?

Another strategy is to survey the more creative research and training programs out there, looking for new models. For example, I know that a new program in health psychology and behavioral neuroscience is being built jointly between UC Berkeley and UCSF to connect neuroscience and psychology at those two institutions. Some of the same people doing that are involved in a new predoctoral training program in emotion, linking Berkeley, Davis, Stanford, and UCSF with a strong commitment to training all Fellows in both biological and psychological substrates of emotion.

By the way, emotion is one of those areas that has been transformed by a perspective that combines biology, neuroscience and behavior. Emotion had been an important area in clinical and developmental psychology for many years. It then became an area ripe for study with neuroimaging techniques. There's even a new field called affective neuroscience that looks at its neural substrates. Imaging techniques have more recently driven the research questions in emotion, with incredible results. We now know that while emotions may be psychological in nature, they are rooted in biology and shaped by culture. I refer you to Richie Davidson's laboratory at the Univ of Wisconsin for the most current view of this.

The lesson here is that we need to rethink our assumptions about areas that previously had been thought of only as social, or only as psychological, or only biological.

There's another lesson to keep in mind as we think about ways to encourage interdisciplinary training. That's the need for balance, even in areas that already are becoming interdisciplinary. In fact, especially in these areas.

I mentioned a second ago that research in emotion has been transformed by advances in neuroscience and imaging, and that technology was in fact driving the research questions. That's good up to a point, but it also was essential to reintegrate the issues from the "old" study of emotion with the newer techniques in order to get a more complete understanding. Otherwise, neuroscience would draw the field too much in one direction and our understanding would be limited to one dimension. This is what I meant earlier when I spoke of a true partnership between behavior and biology. Let me expand a bit more.

Not to pick on neuroscience, because it is one of our most exciting and productive research areas, but all too often in the world of neuroimaging, it is the technology, with its resulting sensational color slides, that drives research beyond what is constructive. Here's an example of how this plays out: At one NIH institute, I heard a series of presentations on intramural brain research, using cutting-edge brain imaging technology. But the speakers used profoundly outdated psychological theory to explain the brain activities they were demonstrating. Some have referred to this general phenomenon as "color phrenology." ("Let's image this part of the brain and see what happens.") Impressive images, yes, but the technology hadn't advanced our understanding of the processes of thinking, memory and learning. The theoretical perspectives on the behaviors being demonstrated by all that technology -- what was being learned, or memorized, or acted on in the brain -- were lifted out of psychological research from the 1960's. For real progress, the technology needs to be paired with the sophisticated theoretical knowledge base that we have in modern cognitive psychology. Okay, maybe Duncan Luce's modeling would be too complicated (and I'm certainly not going to say "Luce loose" again), but there is plenty else going on in modern cognitive science that would make neuroimaging research more meaningful.

I think we will soon be in a similar position in genetics. NIH and private consortia are spending millions per year to map the human genome. It is, at one level, molecular biology at its finest. However, there will come a point at which the question "so now what?" becomes part of the molecular science culture: What do we do with the genes now that we've found them? There already are stories about investigators "knocking out" a gene in a mouse, and being completely surprised at a new and unexpected behavior that then shows itself or at an expected behavior that doesn't. The problem is there is not an a priori sense of where to go next with that result. And without a sophisticated behavioral analysis, there probably cannot be that sense. Let's label this one "knockout phrenology." ("Let's knock out this gene and see what happens.")

In behavioral genetics, developmental psychologists have begun to apply developmental models to genetic information. For example, the work of Robert Plomin and others has revealed some counter-intuitive findings about genetic influences on cognitive ability throughout the lifespan. Intuitively, you might think that environmental effects on thinking and learning become increasingly important during the life span, whereas genetic effects become less important. In fact, research in behavioral genetics has shown just the opposite - that genetic influence on cognitive ability increases from childhood to old age.

There needs to be a modern behavioral perspective injected into genetics to make better sense of what is happening. This probably should include both molecular geneticists trained in behavior and behavioral scientists trained in genetics. Unfortunately, my example notwithstanding, most of behavioral science is sitting on the genetics sidelines, as is virtually all of molecular genetics when it comes to behavior.

And even within biology, I am told technology is beginning to pull research sideways. As technology becomes more powerful, a number of biological researchers I talk to say that they're doing what they do because they have the machines to do it. They're conducting NIH-supported research and becoming successful but they're increasingly less sure about their long term interest in the research or what questions their research is ultimately going to answer. The technology is too much in charge of the direction research is going. The risk is that it will turn into assembly line science.

In this case, I think interdisciplinary research will be needed to reinvigorate the research enterprise. But it also suggests another important piece of what this committee should consider doing. Our scientific institutions need to engage in a deliberate, concerted and systematic effort to inject a more theoretical side into the equation and to undertake activities aimed at shaping the research questions that will be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. Interdisciplinary training has to be more than just teaching psychologists how to run brain imaging equipment or teaching biologists how to use cognitive psychology to measure and interpret the pictures. What behavioral scientists bring to the table are methods, theories, and evaluation strategies that allow a more sophisticated perspective than reductionism to explain the complex processes of human functioning. Combining perspectives from different disciplines should produce a new set of questions, not just new ways to answer the old questions.

So what are some of the specific ways to address these issues and get the next generation of researchers trained at the same time? That's your question to answer, and I don't intend to offer too many specifics here. I've given a couple of strategies. One additional one that is simple and obvious is: Early exposure. That could take many forms at the graduate and even undergraduate levels. I know this kind of generic education is out of the purview of this committee, but it still should anchor our thinking about where we plant the seeds for interdisciplinary research.

Within your purview, I think there could be an NIH-wide initiative to establish a set of training policies that will encourage cross-fertilization of research ideas at various points in a researcher's career, from pre-doc support up through senior career development awards.

As a first step, I would call on the institutes where behavioral research is already a core part of the mission to launch initiatives that put mentors and students from different perspectives together to bring fresh ideas and reshape the questions. I know I said no specifics, but one that comes to mind could be an add-on of some post-doc money to a regular research grant if the researcher is willing to fill the post-doc with a PhD from a different field. I am talking about behavior as the core research area, but certainly something similar could be done in the biological disciplines. But my bias here is at the post-doc level. I think this is where a budding investigator is less likely to simply follow a mentor, and more likely to bring a new perspective to an area. That is what surely will move interdisciplinary research ahead.

More generally, training issues need to become a routine part of interdisciplinary research. As collaborations are encouraged between investigators from different disciplines who are looking at the same phenomena, such collaborations must include a training component.

I also think we should make it possible for people to pursue interdisciplinary research at any point in their careers - not just at the beginning. How about promoting career development mechanisms -- NIH's K awards -- more specifically designed to help senior researchers make the transition to interdisciplinary investigations?

There is another general issue I am somewhat reluctant to raise at a committee of the Institute of Medicine. Oh, but what the heck... I hope you avoid any recommendations that would medicalize psychology or any PhD discipline for that matter. One of the historical barriers that needs to be lowered if increased behavioral neuroscience training is to be accomplished is physician gatekeeping of technology for research. The MD is not a research degree, and, at least to an outsider, the MD gatekeeping role appears to be hindering rather than helping research. No doubt, you all have heard the stories of having to run subjects at 2 am so as not to harm the earnings potential of PET and fMRI machines. More problematic are the PhD researchers who need to apprentice themselves to a physician to get access to equipment -- sometimes to someone who is the head of a laboratory in name only. And if it's not for access to machinery that's the issue, maybe it is access to a clinical population.

Similarly, I hope you'll avoid the temptation to recommend an expansion of NIH's MD-PhD training program. The data from that program's evaluation is that those who receive MD-PhD support behave just like any other PhD researcher, except that they cost 3-4 times more to train. Why not spend scarce training dollars more wisely than that?

Finally, one cautionary note: I said earlier that even though the distinction between biology and behavior is an artificial one, not every behavioral researcher needs to address biological issues, and vice versa. In fact, I believe strongly that we need to make sure that interdisciplinary research flows from a strong core of traditional disciplinary training and research.

One way of looking at your task is the question of how to clone the current leaders in the area of behavioral neuroscience. I am sure some of that is going to mean the kinds of multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and cross-disciplinary training that I have discussed today and that others have discussed. But it is essential to remember that many of the prominent people in the field were not trained interdisciplinarily. Mike Posner was a pre-eminent cognitive psychologist before he ever researched the biological side of the brain. Dan Schacter came out of the straight cognitive laboratory of Endel Tulving. It happened similarly for people like Roddy Roediger. I will even point out that the newest psychologist/neuroscientist to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, Liz Spelke, was trained not all that long ago and in the classic traditions of developmental and cognitive psychology by Jackie Gibson and Ulric Neisser. The idea here is that as you develop recommendations for new ways of training, for building bridges between disciplines, please don't forget the old ways. Don't forget that bridges need strong foundations.

I wish you good luck.

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