Immunology Gets Out of the Box

Biological sciences fall into two broad categories: First, there are ‘‘basal’’ disciplines, including evolutionary biology, genetics, biochemistry, and molecular cell biology. They use universal terminology and focus on problems fundamental to all of biology. Then there are specialized fields, like immunology, neurobiology, microbiology, and physiology. A typical immunologist, neuroscientist, and microbiologist has only a vague idea about what’s going on in each other’s fields, nor would they understand it if it were described by a typical representative of these fields. As these specialized disciplines progress along their independent paths, they get more and more fragmented and insulated because they each develop their own scientific jargon that makes their science impenetrable to researchers in other fields, let alone lay audience. The resulting relation between scientific disciplines does not reflect the connections between their subject matter, resulting ultimately in an unnatural alignment of the scientists with the problems they study. The problem is intensified by the increasing trend of new generations of scientists to specialize early in their careers, focusing on applications of the latest technologies at the expense of developing deep intuitions necessary to see common biological principles across multiple disciplines. Consequently, the explosion of data comes with ‘‘implosion’’ of understanding. Embrace the ‘‘Milieu Intérieur’’