Should research teams include some engineers?

Creekside

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Like everything else, biological processes can be modeled by mathematical equations. Many of those processes involve feedback loops. One factor medical researchers might ignore is time. Having a molecular signal arrive 12 ms--or 12 minutes--late might make a big difference in effect, but you won't find that if your testing method doesn't take the time factor into account. Systems theory is taught in engineering schools, but is it taught in medical schools? Adding an engineering perspective to medical research might be helpful.
 
I think the biggest thing missing from much of research compared to engineering is focus on the priority tasks. I worked in both R&D and Engineering design and in R&D and the latter took forever to get things done. In retrospect we spent a lot of time thinking and talking, Being "creative", instead of doing, although at the time I would have strongly disagreed with that.

For example I see researchers re-inventing the wheel often, thinking their experiment will be the best, when many times you can pick up the phone and within 3 calls you have found a good practical approach. Well, in my time it was the phone. For example if I wanted to do a Seahorse experiment I would pick up the phone to Daniel who has used it extensively in different cell lines and learn the pro's and cons.

It's especially true for sample collection, processing, freezing and thawing, controlling batches etc. Find out best practice and use it. One example is media culture. If I'm doing cell experiments I need to understand how the media culture might affect my experiment. If I have doubts make a few calls.... Same applies to metabolite half life. If something has a short half-life it's going to hard to measure accurately and repeatably, It's the practical aspects that engineering brings that Scientists can miss. Otherwise your experiment could be useless where no one can replicate. Could be 5 years work down the drain.

I've seen best practice used for a pilot study, and then a new "better" creative team gets assigned, does all sorts of experimental tuning, and one year later chooses the exact same experiment the pilot study used except theirs is somehow presented as being much better. But they don't get the same results because they missed a crucial sample handling step.

In Engineering you have project management. That consists of questions like
* Where are you on the plan.
* What issues do you have that need help or escalating.
* What caused the delay. What can we learn and improve from that.
* Does it still make sense to work on this given that X just happened........
And also regular project reviews where colleagues can give feedback.

And too much bureaucracy. For example, sometimes getting access to frozen samples can take many months and what was meant to be a quick experiment turns into a time waster that just distracts.

I don't think there is a simple solution unfortunately.
 
My completely uneducated impression is that most medical researchers underestimate how much of a hard science it really is. You need rigour.

But if JE’s anecdotes are anything to go by, some of the solutions are so counter-intuitive that you might have a hard time making any substantial contributions unless you’ve got a free thinking mind.

The problem is combining both, possibly in a team, but ideally in the same person.

And it seems like most of the BPS proponents either don’t have any of them, or are unable to apply them.
 
Like everything else, biological processes can be modeled by mathematical equations. Many of those processes involve feedback loops. One factor medical researchers might ignore is time. Having a molecular signal arrive 12 ms--or 12 minutes--late might make a big difference in effect, but you won't find that if your testing method doesn't take the time factor into account. Systems theory is taught in engineering schools, but is it taught in medical schools? Adding an engineering perspective to medical research might be helpful.

I think the answer is that to get anywhere working out disease processes you need an intuitive understanding of complex dynamics. I am not sure that teaching systems theory can ever provide this. UCL set up a Systems Biology centre which I was invited to join. It was all jargon from people with no intuitive grasp. "Systems Medicine" is to me another of those empty fads.

Some engineers will have the grasp. The ones who retrain in medicine perhaps unsurprisingly don't seem to (those that can do, those that can't retrain).

My impression is that very few people have the grasp needed to see intuitively why one model of a disease could fly and another would never fly. And yes, it has as much to do with time as the spatial patterns of biochemicals.

The truth is that we understand very little about disease mechanisms other than some simple concepts like too much this. Much of what us taught is wrong. The trouble is that even if you identify more subtle dynamic patterns nobody understands, so the received wisdom never changes.

My experience us that you havd to work in groups of people with complementary neural skills but I am not sure it matters much what formal training they come with.
 
I cultivated an interest in software development and what I saw there in teams in terms of attention to quality control is a world apart from how things seem to be done in research and medicine.

They didn't just build software. They built documentation with the explicit goal to would allow a person with no prior involvement to understand how things worked. In non-commercial projects, the code was public and easily accessible to everyone and public participation was welcome and the project was set up to allow people with a wide variety of skills and experience and time to contribute. There were automated systems that ensured things were working as intended by regularly running tests. The goal wasn't just to build something, but something that worked correctly and reliably.

An approach used was to intentionally try to make the software fail or behave incorrectly. People were encouraged to think about all the ways in which things might fail. Anyone could report issues on a public bug tracker.

If some of this culture came to research it would help improve replication rates, save time and resources and allow more participation by outsiders.

Imagine if the expectation in medical research was not to publish the most positive result that was good for one's impact factor and career, but to create and share reliable knowledge about a particular experiment and the outcome, making everything as freely and easily accessible as possible, so that everyone could have a good chance of replicating the results or spot errors.
 
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