David Hamburg Interview (1986); Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In looking at this set of problems in the work that Carnegie does, and also looking at your career, one sees an emphasis on interdisciplinary ways of looking at a problem, by bringing different kinds of knowledge to bear. What are the constraints to doing that that you have run across in your career?
Well, I think it is enormously important. First let me say, the reason I think it's so important is that the big problems of the real world don't come in neat packages that fit the traditional disciplines. The disciplines are, to some extent, historical accidents and they do develop valuable traditions, approaches, outlooks, modes of inquiry that one has to treasure. At the same time, you need some pooling of strengths in order to get around the contours of a problem like war or disease. You know, being in medicine, and having been in medical schools, it was not unnatural for me to think in those terms because when you have a sick patient, or a disease problem, you've got to look at it from different angles and by specialty, maybe internal medicine, psychiatry, surgery, radiology, whatever seems necessary to understand the problem and cope with it and help the patient. So it was sort of congenial to me to think in those same terms if we were addressing poverty or war as well as disease.
Now, there are problems about it. There are different traditions and even, to some extent, different languages of the disciplines. Moreover, there are turf questions in academic life, as everywhere else. People are proud of what they do, they want to retain the strength of what has been customary for them, and they tend to be concerned that maybe they will lose standing or will lose power, or have their basic traditions undermined if they mix together. However, my experience has been that if you go about it with some tact and respect for the strong traditions of each field, the gains outweigh the losses for most participants. They come to see that they really learn a lot from each other, that it is stimulating, that by pooling their intellectual and technical resources they can get at an important social problem like the threat of nuclear war. And that's worth a great deal.
What is the key to fertilizing ideas? Helping people to see this truth?
I think, first of all, to work toward some shared sense of the nature and scope of the problem you're facing. You find a set of people that have some, at least, inclination toward addressing a particular problem. Maybe it's something they've only dealt with informally or in social contacts before, and yet there is a latent worry, whether it be about nuclear war, or about some disease and public health problem, or whatever. And you try to show that it can really be intellectually stimulating. After all, in the biological sciences we have a lot of experience with important basic discoveries being made through stimulation of some applied problem. For instance, the problem of pneumonia, which was so devastating in the first half of this century, was really the stimulus that led Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty to discover that genetic material is composed of DNA, probably the most basic discovery in the life sciences in this century. There are many other examples. So I think that's part of it, the fact that whatever your field is, you may be stimulated in such ways as to make deeper inquiry or get new insights that you wouldn't get otherwise. That's helpful.
How then is this knowledge, these new insights, made useful or, to state it differently, how do we reach a situation where the men of action, or the men of power, actually act on the insight?
That's terribly important. From an early stage in our program on avoiding nuclear war, and indeed on our other programs, prevention of damage to children, for example, the foundation has set out to make what we call "linkage functions." That is, broadly speaking, linkage between the scientific and scholarly community on the one hand and the policy community on the other, people in government at whatever level, or people close to government who have an interest in the problem. If it's education, then the state level is more significant than the federal. If it's nuclear war, obviously the federal level is important. You try to find convenient and attractive settings in which people from the scientific and scholarly community can interact with some regularity with the people from the policy community and build trust and a shared language of communication and in-depth knowledge of the problem that they're facing. I believe that can be done, but it needs to be worked at systematically. Our experience is that policy makers, at least in the nuclear war area, really welcome that sort of contact.
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