Academic identity crisis

My dad and I happened to be talking about construction failures earlier today -- a raised highway section that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake; the tiles that fell off the Big Dig ceiling. He spoke about them in terms of redundancy and single points of failure, using the engineer lingo that he's picked up from reading books about civil engineering. When I'm being cynical about synthetic biology, I think biologists like to use these terms to make themselves sound sophisticated.

It does bother me, though, that I will graduate from this place with the word "Engineering" on my degree but possibly without the ability to analyze a design, find its flaws, and fix them. I will be able to design an experiment to determine whether Protein X affects Process Y in the cells of Species Z, which covers the word "Biological" on my degree... but will I be a real engineer?

A lot of synthetic biologists come into the field from computer science or electrical or civil engineering, and the whole point of synthetic biology is to turn biology into a Real Engineering Discipline that systematically uses ideas like redundancy in design. If you count up the most prominent synthetic biologists and their origins, it's easy to get the idea that "foreigners" from Real Engineering Disciplines are coming into biology, understanding the science within a week or two, and then dragging it kicking and screaming out of laboratories into design studios and factories. This, too, bothers me.

I do believe that this endeavor will be a truly collaborative one, and will require people with a thorough grounding in biology-the-science as well as people with classical engineering training. I even have a couple of professors' opinions to back this up, although I won't get actual data to confirm or deny this belief until I'm at least in grad school. Certainly biological training helps with designing and conducting experiments; you have to know what a Western blot does in order to know when it's appropriate to do one, and to do it properly. But this makes the biologists sound like the servant underclass in the making of synthetic biology.

Even apart from all this, I worry that synthetic biology, as the newest addition to the family of bioengineering subfields, is not yet ready for its practitioners to be trained in bioengineering instead of in biology or in engineering. I worry that, with an interdisciplinary education, the only thing I'm becoming good at is dabbling, and that I won't develop a true expertise in any particular subfield. -- Then again, isn't undergrad for exploring, and grad school for developing a focus?

My brain just isn't interested in itself.

Reading through jhamrick's last couple of posts at Artificial Awareness made me think about how I used to be enamored of all this stuff -- AI, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics... That was everything I was into, around the last two years of high school and first semester of college. It was who I was. I was Going To Be A Cognitive Scientist, I Was. I read all the right blogs and tried to drag my way through some of the right books (though most of the time I ended up rereading The Language Instinct, which I must have read upwards of a dozen times in its entirety).

Then I changed fields. Long, mostly unrelated story.

But I got to wondering why I'm no longer particularly interested in cognition, AI, or related subfields ('cogsci' for short). I think it's a combination of several factors.

• I had lousy teachers for my introductory psychology and neuroscience classes, and a lousy research experience in cognitive linguistics.

This is not cogsci's fault, but it is a plain fact of my experience and a large part of the reason why I chose to change majors.

• The field is immature; it hasn't had its Watson and Crick.

I consider biology a mature field because so much of it comes down to simply "DNA makes RNA, RNA makes proteins, proteins build the cell's traits and perform its behaviors (and affect DNA)". This was all elucidated in its basic form many years ago. It provides a framework for understanding new experimental results and generating new questions. It is a Coherent Overarching Theory. Cogsci does not appear to have a Coherent Overarching Theory yet, though it seems to have plenty of contenders. I should note that I would expect the Theory Of Cogsci to be significantly more complex than the Theory Of Biology, and take a much longer time to discover.

(I think this point actually applies to basically all of the brain-related fields, although you could argue that basic neuroscience had its Watson-and-Crick moment when people figured out the structure and function of the neuron. I suppose it's also hard to reconcile my assertion that brain science is immature with the current, legitimately amazing progress in brain-machine interfaces -- but I don't know how well we actually understand how they work, or how well we can distinguish them from magic. Anyone who actually follows the news in that area, care to enlighten?)

• I'm too lazy to have philosophical opinions.

Perhaps in a few years I will have the energy and the intellectual horsepower to grapple with the philosophical side of cogsci. But as it is, I can only stomach it in the kind of small doses Douglas Hofstadter likes to sprinkle into his books about poetry. I have always had a hard time motivating myself to think hard about philosophical arguments, figure out their axioms, pick holes in them, etc. etc. -- or, most of the time, to even figure out whether I actually agree with them or if I'm just reading along. I'm much more comfortable playing with cells, or even models of cells where the error is quantifiable.

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There are enough cognitive/AI people amongst my acquaintance that I expect I'll hear some eloquent defenses -- and I'll be glad to hear them, I really will. I'm just happy the field is in such competent hands. If you put me in charge of AI, after all, we'd never discover anything.