Is it true about the academy?

I have been thinking a lot about a quote from Andrew Grove, one of the founders of Intel, when asked about the academic biomedicine community by Newsweek (full article here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/68221).
Newsweek:"What stands in the way of more and faster success in getting cures to patients?"
Grove:"The peer review system in grant making and in academic advancement has the major disadvantage of creating conformity of thoughts and values. It's a modern equivalent of a Middle Ages guild, where you have to sing a particular way to get grants, promotions and tenure. The pressure to conform [to prevailing ideas of what causes diseases and how best to find treatments for them] means you lose the people who want to get up and go in a different direction. There is no place for the wild ducks. The result is more sameness and less innovation. What we need is a cultural revolution in the research community, academic and non-academic. We need to give wild ducks the opportunity to emerge and quack their way to success. But cultural change can be driven only by action at the top."

Putting aside the "wild duck" metaphor (thank goodness he didn't say "wild turkey"), I found myself chewing on this statement for a couple reasons. When I first read this, I went "YES! Heck yeah, that is my view of academia a lot of the time, and I am living it!". When I tried to articulate why Grove was correct, I found myself doing a lot of typing-erasing-retyping-erasing. Although there is a grain of truth in what Grove is saying, I think there is a lot wrong there too. First, I am not sure the right word is "conformity". Because publishing and grant-getting is all a peer-reviewed process, the prevailing norms and beliefs of the "community" is always brought to bear. And it is the community view that evolves and drives change, through the action of individuals. This seems fundamentally different compared to how innovation might occur in electronics where one doesn't need to publish or get grants at all --- there are simply technical problems and a possible solution and corporate funding to make it happen. Finally, I realized it is facile and just plain wrong to try to compare electronics innovation and biomedical innovation, even when one leaves aside the academy entirely. Just from the standpoint of liability, you design a chip that doesn't work, no one gets hurt. No one sues. You make a medicine that is dangerous to people, different story, right?

Bottom line: Academicians value and engage in rapid innovation as much or more than other segments of our society. Their road to get there requires more effort at the community level to make it happen. More and more, that is being recognized and valued in our endeavors. Individual researchers, professional societies and granting agencies are adapting to this new view of how to "get there" in terms of solving real world problems.

The biodiversity of everything everywhere

In my last post, I mentioned I had a mission --- to achieve biodiversity wisdom through accumulating data, summarizing it as information, and then ultimately using that summary to generate knowledge by testing the information and data against our known "ideas". Two pieces of the puzzle that will help us achieve this goal are data portals where one can go and accumulate data about biodiversity, and tools like Google Earth that will help us visualize the data in such a way that we can see the patterns at multiple spatial scales, from global views to local views. The picture on your left shows the record density in Google Earth for Botta's pocket gopher. We accumulated the records of this species from the GBIF data portal (http://data.gbif.org), check to find out if the records have computer-readable geogrpahic coordinates (latitudes and logitudes, for example) and then counted how many of those records occurred in cells of different default sizes. You can try out a tool to create your own KMLs at http://ksord.colorado.edu/.

I need to spend a lot more time talking about the GBIF data portal, because I am sure it is very important - a lynchpin piece towards creating a global, collaborative infrastructure for biodiversity assessment (yeah, yeah, it is also the title of a paper I authored along with Andy Hill and Meredith Lane). This is not the post to do that.

Instead, I want to ask a simple question. If we can do something like show record densities on Google Earth and we know how to assess sample quality... why can't we ask the GBIF data portal what we know so far based on the 135 million biodiversity records in their database. Why can't we determine THE BIODIVERSITY OF EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE (SO FAR)?

What is stopping us?

Achieving Biodiversity Wisdom

I am not quite sure how one finds a mission in life. I imagine many people never do. I never really expected to be able to state one myself, if only because it seemed a bit "heroic" to do so. Instead, I had anticipated a continuing state of schlepy slacker, complete with ironic detachment. I know I haven't lost the schlepy slacker or some of the ironic detachment. I guess you can have a passion about something - that seems pure and noble to you - but still view 99% of the world with mistrust. So, what is this mission I think I have found (there I go again, second guessing myself). Well, that passion is to help provide means for the most number of people to achieve wisdom about biodiversity. And maybe achieve some wisdom myself. I believe this mission is one that is critical for our world. I am not sure we can save ourselves or our planet unless we strive for this wisdom.

Great, I have a mission. So what? Well, I think we can collectively achieve wisdom about biodiversity but it is not an easy road, and there is no simple end point. And of course my views are constrained by my experiences and beliefs. Perhaps there are many many roads, some that are dead ends and some that are not. I have striven to avoid the dead ends, but you never know. Our individual and collective pasts shape and define our presents and future. And damn it is easy to digress when writing a blog entry. So, here is how my mission came together for me in my head, and maybe it explains a lot about my past and maybe it doesn't explain anything at all.

1. A favorite quote from E. O. Wilson from his edited volume on Biodiversity: “Overall, we are locked into a race. We must hurry to acquire the knowledge on which a wise policy of conservation and development can be based for centuries to come.”

2. A favorite way of thinking about how we generate wise policies (or wisdom). This is a direct quote from a paper of mine in the journal Ecological Informatics: "Wisdom, in a systems analysis perspective, is the top portion of a hierarchy that also includes data, information and knowledge – the so called DIKW (data, information, knowledge and wisdom) hierarchy. In order to achieve wisdom, one must first have data – raw observations and measurements. Information is amassed when data are initially summarized or analyzed. Knowledge is created when summarized information is interpreted and used for decision making. Wisdom is continued utilization of knowledge to guide behaviors into the future. Ultimately, the wisdom of our biodiversity decision-making will be based in part on the quality of the data we have, on how effectively we can mobilize that data and tools to create knowledge, and on how quickly we can achieve this goal given the current biodiversity crisis".

So hopefully you can begin to see how we might achieve biodiversity wisdom. I want to lay out more of this view, in more detail, in later posts. The lynchpin is going to be accumulating, and making available in easy to use formats, data about global biodiversity. We need to remove all impediments from using that data and build ways for people to easily convert that data into information and knowledge. One day some of us might get to wisdom. I hope so.