Il y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline when it comes to scientific discovery

By Alice P. Gast  | Wednesday, May 9, 2012 | 8

Nations are rivals in soccer and international relations, but science is a unifying force. Many of our biggest achievements seem to come from international collaborations. A team from 11 laboratories in nine countries identified the SARS cor­onavirus in 2003 with unprecedented speed. Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Col­lider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe. The world of science is getting flatter.

What has gone underappreciated in this trend is the effect on science itself and how science is actually done. It has become a cliché that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking—a chemist bringing insight to a discussion of a materials problem, a physicist sharing an intuition about a problem in biology, a biologist helping an engineer see how nature comes up with optimal solutions. Few realize how much science is energized when team members have different cultural approaches to problem solving. International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline.

I have seen this phenomenon at close quarters. For years I have collaborated with colleagues from Mexico and Germany. We see eye to eye on so many things. We like one another’s cuisine, hiking, and the mathematics and physics our research involves. When we began writing out equations on a chalkboard, though, our cultural differences became apparent.

When we first started out, our approaches seemed irreconcilable. The physics problems we work on—fluid suspensions of small particles—are hard. They encompass many unknowns, and the physics bumps up against many constraints and boundary conditions—rules that cannot be broken, like conservation of matter or the impassibility of a solid wall. While working on difficult equations, my Mexican cohorts wanted to relax the rules to make the mathematics more tractable and later put them back in. This set our German friends on edge. They kept reminding us of the constraints and the boundary conditions to make sure we did not stray too far. My American training left me somewhere in the middle: I worried about the constraints but was tentatively willing to relax them.

Over the years the creative clash of viewpoints bred success. The German-Mexican teams, along with some Americans, wound up solving challenging multibody hydrodynamics problems—the complicated mathematical descriptions of the way swarms of particles squeeze the fluid between them, explaining the flow behavior of pastes and slurries.  

I first got a lesson in cross-cultural dynamics during a NATO post­doctor­al fellowship in Paris in 1985. Working with French colleagues taught me a different way to simplify and clarify a physics problem. An appreciation for the beauty of the problem and the value of intuition might have led us to solutions more easily than the typical American approach: to attack the problem with loads of mathematical equations. Later in Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awardee, I found that approaching an experimental problem with a deliberate, tactical and strategic way reduced the need for trial and error.

The power of this diversity of thought comes alive in international conferences where there is an opportunity to listen, ask questions, think about problems, confer with and critique one another, and continue the dialogue after the meeting is over.

New institutions have sprung up to take advantage of the synergies in multinational collaborations. Singapore has created an intensely international science scene, where talent converges to contribute and compete to form some of the best research teams in the world. In December, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology graduated its second cohort of men and women receiving master’s degrees in science and engineering, who hail from Saudi Arabia, China, Mexico, the U.S. and 29 other countries. Labs, institutes and universities are hubs that gather the best scientists to tackle the hardest problems.

The need to reach across national boundaries places greater demands on scientists. While scientists become more specialized as they proceed through their studies, broadening and collaborative experiences make them better able to “think differently” and “connect the dots” to discover new things. Ultimately it leads to better science. 

Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be When I have fears that I may cease to be     Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery,     Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,     Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace     Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,     That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power     Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

 William Blake. 1757–1827

487. The Little Black Boy

MY mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O, my soul is white!

White as an angel is the English child,

But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree, 5

And, sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissèd me,

And, pointing to the East, began to say:

'Look at the rising sun: there God does live,

And gives His light, and gives His heat away, 10

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

'And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love;

And these black bodies and this sunburnt face 15

Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,

The cloud will vanish; we shall hear His voice,

Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."' 20

Thus did my mother say, and kissèd me,

And thus I say to little English boy.

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear 25

To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him, and he will then love me.

The poem "When I heard the learned astronomer" by Walt Whitman.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,