Building data systems to break down research silos

As I had lunch with my fellow synthetic organic chemists in my student days, we chatted through a tough chemoselective reduction. We had a few ideas for either homogeneous catalysts, or the organic chemists’ generic heterogeneous option ‘palladium on carbon’. Our new PhD student, fresh from a chemical engineering Master’s, walked in and suggested a specialist supported catalyst, tuned just right to provide the perfect reducing power for our tricky carbon–carbon double bond while retaining a halogen elsewhere. The oldest synthetic student looked straight at him and summarily dismissed the idea by saying, ‘yeah, we don’t do that here’. This was baffling – but he was undeniably correct, we didn’t do that there. How much better we could have been if we had accepted ideas from outside our rigid experience!

History is replete with cases of pioneering scientists achieving success after refusing to be bound by the confines of a single discipline. Even within synthetic organic chemistry, working flexibly across boundaries has caused previously shunned technologies like photochemistry, electrochemistry and Design of Experiments to rise in popularity. Nowadays, leaders also spend much time and heartache trying to push interdisciplinarity, despite a system that seems bent on rejecting the notion. Academics grouse that they can’t find the right journals and that university leaders don’t understand the different publication metrics of differing fields, plus it’s tougher to recruit outside the safety of a single discipline.