Abstract
In terms of fundamental, universal scientific progress in the area of “hard sciences,” the past century was the one of relativity, quantum mechanics, and solid state/surface physics, whereas the 21st century prospects a focus on genomics/life/brain sciences, computer sciences/artificial intelligence, climate, and extraplanetary research. Among these, neurosciences represent a meta-plane, where new tools and insights provide key contributions to revolutionizing our current understandings. Increasingly, we move toward a quantitative description of various neural phenomena as well as to a new understanding of the nervous system and brain organization/functioning in particular. All this is strongly influencing the way we see the world. From this process, finally yet importantly, we derive large benefits for the cure of diseases as well as the management of an aging society.
Swiss Academies focus
In 2016, the board of directors of the Swiss Academies of Science has put the topic “Interdisciplinarity” to the top of the priority list of the project portfolio on the subjects:
Patient oriented, personalized medicine.
Aging society: technology, organizations, and economy.
Energy, environment, and resources.
Digitization and employment in industry, services, and administration.
Dialog with youth and parents, lifelong apprenticeship, flexible workload, gender-related aspects.
Steps toward a Swiss human technopole for social development 2030.
This approach reflects renewed worldwide efforts in tearing down virtual barriers between scientific, technical, and social faculties in order to promote an enlightening, future-oriented, true cross-border collaboration.
With increasing occurrence, discoveries and innovations following them—that is their implementation in the market place—hatched in the minds of researchers well off the track of their original expertise.
These researchers, guided by sheer curiosity, driven by full dedication (“feu sacré”) and autonomously learning in the process, ventured entering unknown territories while taking along fresh and broad new perspectives on their way to becoming the new experts.
“Crossing the borders of disciplines”
An impressive recent example is the Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine 2014 May-Britt Moser. She openly admitted not knowing much about the brain’s anatomy at all, at the beginning of her investigations. Despite, or maybe because of this, she and her husband Edvard I. Moser managed to identify cells that constitute a kind of Global Positioning System (GPS) in the brain.
Whether it is called medicine, biology, or, more specifically, biochemistry and molecular biology of the nervous system is merely a question of scale. In order to reduce complexity to a bearable level, several “scale-related cutoffs” found their way into academic terminology.
The true “hard-style” science Mathematics vitally depends on his link to implementation by physicists and engineers, who in their turn, left to themselves, would build a world not worth living in, if it wasn’t for the “softness” provided by social sciences, humanities, and arts.
Along the progression of scale and complexity, nonlinear biological systems are often as impossible to predict as chaotic systems. However, biological systems are not—at least not entirely—chaotic!
How much so, mankind is about to investigate—in a new way—complex systems, that is, tackling the challenge of the meaning of “understanding” with the aid of modern computer simulations. We are going to use methods of the physics of phases transitions, spectroscopic imaging systems from nuclear magnetic resonance to positron emission tomography to synchrotron radiation and soon—with unprecedented resolution—coherent radiation from free electron lasers. In such cases, problem-solving becomes a matter of particularly careful and conscientious planning.
As the increasing resolution in imaging sharpens our understanding, our possibility to manipulate becomes finer and quickly dives into the molecular scale: Fascinating advances in microtechnology make us strive toward the use of sophisticated tools like ultraprecise nano-robots. First attempts will be just for trial and error, i.e. experiments. Later these procedures and tools will be used routinely for actually curing nano-surgically even genetic-surgically from within the body.
While enjoying the enthusiasm for such perspectives, we have to bear in mind that, in contrast to progress implemented in software, the implementation of progress in the “real world” involving hardware takes within the order of 10 years. This is the incubation period between its discovery, the proof of concept, and the approval of the lawmakers for market introduction.
Computer experiments, that is, computer simulations using established procedures like the Monte Carlo method, are excellent tools for the analysis of an incredible large amount of somehow correlated data in extremely short time—see high-energy physics experiments at CERN. This has also led to an area that is developing fast: the one where researchers obtain new insights from already existing experimental or statistical data using a computer-based analysis of “pattern recognition.”
An example of the rapidly expanding area of “big data” applications is the discovery of John Diffley presented at the Foundation Louis Jeantet in Geneva. 1 He showed how it was possible to get totally new insights using existing data, without the addition of new experimental results. With fundamental new insight into the DNA replication initiation mechanism, experts see the goal of planning and building a functional chromosome from its constituent parts within reach.
Sophisticated experimental techniques, like “flash tag,” the one pioneered by the team of Denis Jabaudon in Geneva, 2 will help understanding the role of genes in neuron development, possibly leading to the prevention of errors and thereby avoiding diseases.
Personalized medicine and personalized health
The Swiss State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation has recently promoted the Swiss Personalized Health Initiative, a national project of about 100 mio CHF for 2017–2020. The Swiss Academy of Medicine is involved as a coordinating body. The challenges on this ambitious path were described in Bern early 2016 in a conference of the Federation of European Academy of Medicine on the topic.
“Personalized Medicine and Personalized Health—New Dimensions”
In summary, a recommendation of many participants was to use the empowerment of the citizen in order to solve the problem of data acquisition. The appropriate way, for example, anonymized, clinical data would come directly from the patient. We must and can “keep things simple,” connect to the broad public, and promote its self-empowerment and self-government.
The book by David Linden, “The accidental mind,” has stimulated a lively discussion among physicists and technologists on the influence of brain plasticity and behavior in relation to neural circuits disorder. From perception to emotions, and from motivations to social behavior, we now look at behavior from a very different perspective. Old buzzwords are becoming very fashionable again, such as, neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and so on.
We can safely state that we are about to revolutionize our basic understanding of human life, especially brain functioning and group behavior.
Interdisciplinary approaches, from medicine to software engineering, provide wide new research areas and therefore employment.
Neurosciences provide fundamental basics to research ranging from overall individual behavior to details of the interhuman network, from various sensors (eye, nose, ear, skin) to the brain, down to the molecular—ionic transport—level. Major byproducts are the likes of improved microscopic understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, as A. Ballabio 3 has shown in the case of malfunctioning of a specific lysosomal protein.
Aging society
A second topic that the Swiss Academies have prioritized for the interdisciplinarity research and development platform is “Aging society: technology, organizations and economy.”
As aging increases, so does the use of pharmaceuticals. Polypharmacy and multimorbidity are just two problems of the list of subjects in need of an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, in order to understand the individual, we need to increase our knowledge about “complexity.”
Can we expect that—because of research ethics and integrity—the ease of recording and therefore reproducibility of results will soon improve? Will we be able to admit that some experiments have been unsuccessful? As unquestionable benefit, the publication of reproducible, unsuccessful results could help to spare many millions in superfluous research efforts and avoid frustrations.
Footnotes
Author’s note
Following years of research at the Bell Laboratories NJ/USA, Maurice Campagna—a physicist—was Professor for Physics at the University of Köln, Director in the Research Center of Jülich/DE and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETHZ. Thereafter, he joined the global ABB Group to direct Corporate Research and later ABB-Alstom as Chief Technology Officer. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, of the Swiss Academy of Technical Science and member of Economiesuisse, commission for education, research and innovation. From 1 January 2016, he is the President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.