INSIDE EOSC 10 – Robbert Dijkgraaf
Andrew Dubber
Hi, and welcome to Inside EOSC, a podcast all about the inner workings of the European Open Science Cloud. I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m a senior researcher at the Industry Commons Foundation, and I’m a consortium member of an EOSC project called LUMEN. And every month I introduce luminaries, people who are central to the LUMEN project and, of course, to the wider EOSC ecosystem.
This month my guest comes from a little beyond the project’s usual orbit, and he is one of the broadest-ranging minds you could hope to put in front of a microphone. Robbert Dijkgraaf is a theoretical physicist who spent the best part of a decade directing the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, known as the place where Einstein spent the last two decades of his life, and who has since moved between the frontier of physics, the leadership of great scientific institutions, and the machinery of government.
Now what drew me to him is not the length or the weight of the CV, but the way that he thinks about what science is for, how it should sit alongside society, and what it might yet become. I sat down with him at the EOSC symposium last year in Brussels, just after a keynote that had the room rethinking the whole enterprise. Here’s our conversation.
I’m very happy to have with me today Robbert Dijkgraaf, who is the president-elect of the International Science Council, a distinguished university professor at the University of Amsterdam and the former minister of education, culture and science for the Netherlands. Robbert, it’s fantastic to have you here on the podcast. Really glad you could join us.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Wonderful to be here. I look forward to our conversation.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. Well, I’ve just sat through. I very much enjoyed a keynote of yours at the EOSC Symposium here in Brussels. And one of the things I was really interested in is that you did a kind of a setup where you talked about the technologies that we have worked on in the 20th century as the building blocks. And the project, the overall cultural scientific project of the 21st century is to build things with those building blocks. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that idea?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes, exactly. Because if you see what were the great breakthroughs in the 20th century, it’s like finding the atoms, the particles of matter, DNA, genetic code in life, bits and algorithms in information.
And I think now we are in a position, literally, where we can build materials atom by atom. We can program the genetic code and make organisms or molecules that are completely new. And obviously, we are also in the age of artificial intelligence. So even the thoughts that we have been thinking and the machines by which we think, which was mainly our brain, are now vastly expanding.
So we’re going into almost artificial science. And there’s a traditional image of science discovering what’s out there in the world. But I think science will be much more about studying and the things that we make in the laboratories. So in some sense, this exciting development of the last 13.8 billion years in cosmic evolution is now accelerated in laboratory planet Earth, where, of course, we are now in a kind of this renaissance where we can think of basically anything that our mind, our imagination can capture. So sometimes have the image that we have been sailing on this beautiful winding river and now we’re certainly in the open ocean.
Andrew Dubber
I like the choice of words of Renaissance, which is actually a particular metaphor for this sort of thing. And there’s a lot to talk about here, but I think this idea of culture and Renaissance being very much associated with the arts. You were Minister of Culture, but you’re a theoretical physicist. How do all these things fit together for you?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, I think the arts and science have a very natural kind of interface, which is, by the way, not the polished outside. It’s not the museum pieces or the Nobel Prizes. It’s this kind of very vulnerable insight, which is about exploration. It’s about imagination. So it’s about thinking what could be out there. And then the creativity and the curiosity to actually go and explore.
And I think actually the future of science will be much more like the arts because if you can make anything, if you can think any thought, what will you do? How would you sail this infinite ocean? And if you don’t have somehow a vision, what you want to achieve, and that’s what artists do. So artists, the moment they put a pencil on paper, they can make anything. But great artists have somehow already a vision where they want to end up.
And I think so that element, the design element, will come more and more into play in science. And then, of course, it comes with many other questions. Should you do it? Should you not do it? What is your overall aim? And that’s absolutely fascinating, but I think we are kind of very lucky. I think there’s basically only one time in the history of science where this kind of synthetic materials of artificial intelligence, artificial designer materials come along. And that’s this moment. So we are in a moment, I think, of quite spectacular transition into a different age.
Andrew Dubber
There is a Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
I think we all do.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Oh, yes.
Andrew Dubber
I think when you talk about the building blocks, I think that’s a really lovely metaphor. Until you really go deep into it, you talked about the building blocks being about the building blocks of life, DNA, proteins, and genetics, and so on, the building blocks of atoms and molecules and subatomic particles, and also the building blocks of digital technology.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
And so on. When you build with those blocks, it feels like something greater is at stake than if you’re building blocks in an artistic context. And it almost seems like act one of a dystopian science fiction film where you say, we have all these great things, what can we build? How do we start to think about, I guess regulation is probably a good framework to put that in, what we should try and what we shouldn’t be allowed to try?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, I think it’s a very valid point that this adds to the pure power of science and technology. And it’s not only becoming larger in terms of its scope, but it’s also accelerating in time. And so we are rushing forward. And it comes with incredible deep questions of a moral and ethical nature, about what our vision is, our mission to go forward with those technologies. It comes with a very deep question whether society is willing to accept this and absorb those technologies.
So all of this, I think, makes it for me a time where science itself is changing. You can no longer be, say, well, I’m a simple scientist. I’m doing my work in my lab and I’m not, I don’t feel responsible for what’s happening with the world. I think this really requires from the scientific enterprise to have a much greater awareness of what the consequences are of all of this, which can be both positive and negative. It’s a really, really delicate balancing act.
So I feel we are speeding along, and there’s this utopian and dystopian points of view, and you somehow want to have this kind of middle way where we require a kind of balance. So there’s a beautiful phrase in physics, which is adiabatic change. So adiabatic change is change where at every moment in the process, you stay in equilibrium. So my favorite metaphor is I can get a cup of tea and bring it from the kitchen to the dining table. I can also throw it.
And clearly there’s a certain risk that society gets out of balance while those forces are addressing us. But on the other hand, if people are seriously ill, there’s a lot of areas in the world that desperately need science and technology and innovation. So part of us says, well, we want to accelerate. We want those solutions as soon as possible. And the other part says, well, wait a moment. We have to make sure it’s done in a responsible, deliberate way. And we have to keep our connection to society while all of this is happening.
Andrew Dubber
I’m struggling to think of which bit to latch onto next because there’s so much packed in there. I think the idea of society being a key component of this is really interesting. And quite a lot of what you hear, particularly from a science policy perspective, is this idea of there are scientists and then there are citizens.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
As if those things are not in any way connected with each other. And we have to consult the citizens, but we have to do our science.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
Is there a way to bridge that?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, so I think this is one of the most serious challenges in science, is that this kind of gap there is between the scientific community and the rest of society. And of course, scientists are part of society, but it’s growing almost by definition because science and technology proceeds. It becomes more complicated. Who knows what’s happening exactly in your smartphone or what is the process by which vaccines are developed or new technology in general.
So in some sense, technology and science is moving away. It’s becoming more complicated to explain. You’re digging deeper and deeper underground. On the other hand, that all those science and technology are impacting our lives in a much more direct way. So that’s kind of a paradox, right? And a really bad development would be where science is like control everything and we don’t understand anything and we’re kind of disconnected from it, but yet we are totally controlled by it. So the question is, how do we bridge that gap?
And it’s very delicate because the interface between science and society is not just a simple straight line. It’s more like this fractal thing that it’s moving everywhere. And as a government minister, I’ve seen that there is basically no big political societal issue where science doesn’t play a key role, whether it’s from economic growth to health to agriculture to water, basically any topic, nature, obviously. And so how do you navigate that boundary where you, on the one hand, the scientific community is really in touch with society. And I think this should be an act of dialogue.
It’s not about scientists explaining what they’re doing for reasons of getting more funding or getting more talent. It’s also listening to society, what society wants. And although there’s a huge promise of science and technology, it’s not obvious how it will actually deliver on that promise. If you see, well, even at a global scale, look at the sustainable development goals. We are not tracking those goals. Many people say, well, science, it’s all words. It’s beautiful advertisement. But where is the meat? Are you actually producing the results that gives a better life?
And the only way to do so is not just listen, but to actively collaborate with society. And that could be in your local neighborhood. Yes, we need breakthrough medical research, but also the local physician, the general practitioner, might be the way in which actually medicine interacts with society. And so it should be much more a collaborative effort, usually called transdisciplinary science, in the sense that science is transcending its academic environment. And it could be citizen scientists. There are many, many ways in which the society as a whole can be involved. But I think it’s absolutely crucial for science to deliver on its promises.
Andrew Dubber
I’m really interested in the idea of affordances in technology, particularly. And I think that there is a danger of this idea of solutionism, of society has these problems, scientists go away and fix those problems and come back to us when you have a fix for that. But I think that when you make things that are creative and experimental and then you find out what they’re for, that the affordances reveal themselves to it and we can improve lives in ways that we might not have imagined even possible. Is that encouraged in scientific research?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, I totally agree with you that they said of Steve Jobs that he delivered products that people didn’t even realize they wanted. And I think science is a little bit like that too. By the way, society asking for concrete solutions is really a very dangerous path because you can do this in a narrow sense, but often policies are overdetermined. We put more conditions on what we want from science than science actually can deliver. So it’s like you have more equations than variables. And that gives a lot of frustration.
And there is indeed a component to science that basically solves problems by making them much bigger to have a much larger solution space. I wrote a little book with the title, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. And it’s about that the really major breakthroughs came in science, often out of sheer curiosity, certainly opening up complete fields. So the discovery of the genetic structure of DNA, the code, et cetera, certainly made us aware that all previous efforts to, say, address a huge problem like cancer were kind of silly, because we didn’t even know what was inside this complicated mechanisms of life.
And it certainly opened up this perspective. So the remarkable thing is that looking backwards, we are very much aware, we need this kind of out-of-the-box thinking, but then it’s really difficult for people to take that lesson and take it forward and structure our whole attitude towards science and technology in a way where it also opens up this completely different venue.
So there’s a joke often about mathematicians that you ask them to solve a certain problem, and they come back and they say, did you solve my problem? No, but I found a much more interesting problem. And actually, that’s how it works. Sometimes science says, well, this is not the right way to phrase it. You should think it in a different way and have completely different ideas.
So how do we train young people to think like this? And we talked about the arts as a way to jump out of your frame and think in a completely different fashion and something that we have seen in science too quite often. And the interesting fact is I think that this jump to kind of a next level typically doesn’t come because of the urgency of a problem. It’s just the sheer curiosity and drive of scientists who just the pleasure of moving into the unknown.
Andrew Dubber
You speak like not a scientist who imagines what it might be like to be an artist, but a scientist who is an artist. Would that be a fair characterization?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, well, the thing that sticks out in my CV is that I spent some time in art school. And one thing which I really liked about the way the arts educate is that in arts education it’s not about the result. There’s not a final exam that you can have a perfect score on. What you measure in the arts is how explorative have you been, just how much material did you create, how much did you make something your own.
And if you actually start on a scientific career and you’re certainly at the phase of your education that you have to start to think for yourself. You have to basically, there’s no exam. And in fact, you should formulate your own questions and there’s no guarantee that there is an answer. You are also staring in this big unknown. And often the way you get started is just to do stuff. So I often tell my students, just do calculations. Even if you know that something is already worked out in the literature, don’t go and look it up. Try to see whether you can kind of home cook it. And then you somehow develop the muscles that you need to be explorative.
Andrew Dubber
Let’s talk about the European Open Science Cloud for a moment. Because I always ask the question, what is the European Open Science Cloud? Because I keep getting different answers every time I do it. And I don’t want to just keep repeating myself. So I’m going to try and ask it a different way, which is to you, what do you think is the function of the European Open Science Cloud?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
For me, the overarching function is to have this kind of central nervous system in Europe through which data flows, is curated, is processed in a way that reaches, I would say, all the parts of this research enterprise and make it in a more kind of dynamic environment. And we see that data is becoming absolutely key in all those developments. If I think of removing into this kind of ocean of opportunities, what is driving this? It’s knowledge.
So data and the growth of data and the processing data is actually key to progress. And we have to do it in a way that both connects all the national infrastructure. So it’s very, very natural. I think just as you look at the map of Europe and you see all the trains and you see the roads, I see the data flow.
And I think it’s also very important that it’s not only data that is flowing into the minds of scientists, et cetera, but it’s also a way in which it’s flowing out towards society. And it’s absolutely key for us that we involve, in my view, society in this great adventure that science is.
Andrew Dubber
What does that look like, the involvement of society?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
It could be very practical. It could be if you’re a medical researcher, clearly you need the data of your patients. And they are very valuable. There are a lot of concerns around that. Obviously if you’re like a radio astronomer you’re picking up data from distant galaxies, it’s a different kind of connection.
And but it was said here in this conference that knowledge is something that grows if you share it and you use it. And I think for data too it’s absolutely crucial. So again, just as the progress of science is complicated because there are a lot of moral and ethical domains to it, the natural increase in use of data comes with these kind of considerations. How do we manage it? How do we respect privacy? How do we do it in a responsible way? How do we make sure that the data is not corrupted, that we’re not being manipulated by it?
There are lots of discussions that we’re becoming a very data-focused society, and if this is this central connecting nervous system, it’s incredibly important that we manage it in a way that is kind of set standards. And ideally Europe should be leading the world in setting standards how we deal with data. And the interesting thing is that I like to think Europe is like a scale model for the world, because ideally we would like the whole world to collaborate and have the same kind of standards.
We know that’s very difficult. But the European Union has teeth. There is a European Commission. There are European budgets. They’re relatively small compared to the national budget, but there is true power in Brussels. So I think this kind of interesting ecosystem that Europe is is actually also a really interesting laboratory to see what is the future of data use and data management.
Andrew Dubber
Right. Data gets used a lot as a kind of a hold-all description for any digital information.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
And we talk a lot about data interoperability, but when it comes down to it, data is not interchangeable. It’s not the same as I think of healthcare data versus you mentioned astrophysics. The data set of a patient has a point of view. It has a life. It has an experience.
I’m working with a project which is around creating a trusted research environment for healthcare AI. And all of these questions come up all the time. And it comes down to, when you talk about data, you’re talking about a person’s experience of health and illness. And do we have to think about data in compartmentalized ways? Or can we come up with this sort of generalized data should be treated in a particular way?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, that’s a very good question. So probably it’s a little mix. So I would love to have like general principles that are common. But then at some point you need also this infant, this individual coloring. And indeed, if you think of patient data, it’s much more sensitive. But by the way, in my experience involving patients and patients unions or societies, in thinking about the future of healthcare, I often find that they are quite forward thinking, that they sometimes are very, very touched by patients that say, well, I want my data to be part of future solutions, although it might not help me, but it might help.
So it also comes with a lot of understanding and involvement. And I think that’s good too. So I think it’s kind of wrong to think that science pushes in one way and society and citizens are pushing back. I think you get actually better data, better involvement. And so, yes, in every domain, you have to work with all those aspects. But that’s the same thing about science itself. We have some common methods and ideas, but there’s a lot of individual coloring. And if you’re a historian or a mathematician, you share some things, but also you love the individual aspects of your field. And so thinking of data as just zeros and ones, I think, is not a very productive way to think about it. It’s actually incredibly rich.
Andrew Dubber
You said something interesting just before about Europe should lead, and I’m paraphrasing here, but Europe should lead on data policy.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
Why?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, I think there are, in general in life, there are many things you can do, but only a few that only you can do. And I think actually the Europe with its complicated structure, its history of pluriform structures, different cultures, different languages, is actually an ideal natural laboratory to have science grow in a way that it really has a responsible relation to society.
And other parts of the world, they might have more philosophy that you first break things and then you correct them or you have a top-down heavy state influence that kind of thinks for you. Europe is very different. It’s more bottom-up, but not entirely bottom-up. It’s this kind of nice mix of having some central way of thinking but at the same time respecting kind of the bottom up structure. So I think these big questions how you develop technology in a responsible way where citizens are engaged are actually accepting the results of science and technology, I feel Europe is an ideal laboratory.
And to be honest there always has been a very good connection between I would say the spirit of science and the spirit in Europe because science has some kind of universalist approach to it. It’s kind of a win-win. We often think that if you have different perspectives in science it’s a good thing because there is not just one way to look at a phenomena.
So there are elements I would say in the spirit of science that actually match really well, I think, the European spirit. And so while there might be other areas of science technology where other parts of the world have an advantage, whether it’s massive investments or centralist approach or unleashing market forces, these are not naturally Europe’s strength. But I think about connecting science and technology to human rights, democratic values, I feel if Europe doesn’t get this right, who will?
Andrew Dubber
Right. I’m also aware of the fact that Europe doesn’t have an entirely unproblematic history of taking its ideas to the rest of the world.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
What do we have to be careful about in that respect?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, I think Europe has a really bad record in telling the rest of the world how to behave and being very aggressive in this. And our history of colonialism and expansionism is a complicated one. But on the other hand, Europe is connected to the world. And in fact, various regions, nations are connected to different parts of the world. And these are deep ties.
If we think about how we want to bring the rest of the world along, Europe’s model, which I think of a series of concentric circles where there’s the EU 27 and actually inside the EU 27, that itself has grown. There’s the six founding members. And so there’s this kind of onion. And then there are the associated countries to the European research area. And there are a lot of individual like-minded countries that are part of some of our big scientific efforts.
And often you see that this complicated relationship that Europe has can also, again, be a starting point. So I think often if you see, for instance, how do students flow? Well, there’s obviously a stream of Latin American students to Spain and Portugal. There’s a relation between France and Africa. From the Netherlands, we have relations with the Caribbean or Indonesia or Suriname, which are on the one hand problematic, but also deep ties.
So I think after all of this, we might be also coming into an area where Europe is seen as, the new Europe, I would say, is seen as a kind of a reliable partner for collaborations. And I think if we put our values front and center, this will actually be very attractive.
Andrew Dubber
You strike me as very optimistic about these things. And I don’t mean that in a kind of a wishful thinking sort of way, but you have a positive vision for a future in this respect. But I have to ask, particularly with your political experience, what is it that gives you that sense of optimism or that gives you a basis on which to pin that sense of optimism, given everything?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Well, I think it is our, first of all, it’s our duty to be optimistic. I think long term, the world has really come far. The other day I was speaking about how the increase in lifespan, your life expectations, which was like around in the 30s, in 1870. And somebody said, well, is this really true? And then I just looked up my genealogy. My great great grandfather was born in 1870 and was a family of 10 where I think 3 only reach adulthood. And you think wait a moment, we really have achieved something in science. This is not an abstract fact. So I think you can be optimistic long term also based on real data.
Second, I think is that everything is becoming fluid. So it’s also difficult to be negative because even if you’re really a pessimist, you still have to admit that a lot of things will move and will change. Neither an optimistic or a pessimist mode doesn’t have any basis unless you also have an idea what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it.
So I think, again, it’s very important also in the political domain to have a vision where you want to go, to be realistic and see, is it actually based on your strength? Do you have the capacity? Is there indeed truth in advertising? Because nothing deflates like a vision that is not realistic. But there’s really also a risk here of underestimating the power of science and technology. And so if we on the one hand see that we are reaching this different stage, this new renaissance of science and technology and not grasping this, I think this would be a total waste in the moment of history.
Andrew Dubber
I think there’s something that scientists and artists have in common, which is a willingness to experiment.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
I don’t know if that’s shared by politicians. And I don’t know how you might convince them to think of it as a good idea.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, it’s true. So it’s often said that science and politics are exactly opposite. Science is international. It’s rational. It’s win-win. It’s optimistic. And politics is national or even regional. It’s emotional. It’s zero-sum. Most elections are zero-sum. In fact, it’s also intrinsically negative. So social scientists have shown that in politics, if you talk longer about a certain topic, people start to think more negatively about it.
So I think it’s incredibly important that science tries to infuse some of its optimism into the world of politics without being naive. This kind of techno-optimism that we see in other parts of the world, I find dangerous too because it’s not founded in reality and it doesn’t bring society along. But obviously in politics you have to be careful. As I said, you want to change but you want to change in a way in which you keep in balance. But I think there’s a very easy prediction that if we look at policy issues and politics in the future they will be more and more infused by science and technology.
Andrew Dubber
We have been through some difficult times in history before, and we’re in a kind of a fraught, complex time at the moment. One of the things that strikes me about these fraught, complex times in the past, and one way or another, we have come up with really great progress, particularly through science and technology through that. It feels like the drive for progress has kind of gone off the agenda a little bit. Nobody seems interested in the idea of progress anymore. Is that fair?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
I agree. So there has been this kind of a social compact between science and society, where society says, well, we spend our tax euros, and you deliver new medicine, new technology. And this is this framework, which often is called, after this report that Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote in 1945, where basically he was asked the question, well, we have seen tremendous delivery of science in war times. What can it deliver in peace times? And his idea was, well, just keep on spending at the same rate as you did in time of crisis. And we can solve many societal issues.
And I think this natural compact, I think, has lost for many its value. And I think we’re now at a moment where we have to redesign this. So indeed, people, there’s a lot of negative feelings. People do not look at science and technology as a source of optimism. Often they even see it as adding to the problems, whether it’s the deterioration of the climate or the environment or technology being out of control.
So the question is, how do we safeguard the promise of progress that science and technology offers, while at the same time building this kind of public support. So I think actually this, as the scientific community can ask that we have a different kind of society or a different kind of politics, I think perhaps in the long term, yes. In the short term, I think it means that science has to change. It has to be cognizant of what’s happening in society. It has to reach out. It has to build those relations and together redesign that social compact. And I think actually I see this as the biggest challenge for science these days.
Andrew Dubber
Because earlier you were talking about, I guess, in a way, putting science into democracy. What you’re talking about now is putting democracy into science.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes, exactly.
Andrew Dubber
I think that’s a really interesting parallel to that. And it brings up for me, because I’m really interested in the idea of the commons, and we were talking before we started this recording about your name.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
It’s a really interesting story. And I know we shouldn’t introduce you towards the end of the podcast, but your name is Dijkgraaf. Can you tell me a little bit about that word and what it means?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, the dijkgraaf is a function that was started in the Netherlands in the Middle Ages because there were a lot of the polders, the parts that were protected by dikes, where each farmer had to take care of his little part of the dike. And then there was somebody pointed by the Count of Holland to make sure that they all did their job. And he would go around in the little car along the dikes and just make sure that everybody did their little piece to keep everybody dry. And of course, flooding was life threatening. And I recently read that he could issue in severe cases even capital punishment.
But what I really liked about that, that that role was a democratically elected role. So the farmers elected somebody, said, well, we want to be. Basically, they didn’t trust their neighbor and they wanted to have somebody to go along and just check that you do your little part to literally protect the commons. And in some sense, that’s I find a very inspiring combination. It was democracy many, many, many centuries before we had it at the national level or the provincial level or let alone the European level. And these days you can still vote for the people who sit in the Watership Council. So there is this little quirk in Dutch elections that we not only vote on land, we also vote on water.
Andrew Dubber
Right. Wow. You mentioned in your talk quite a lot about interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. And it is an idea I’m very interested in. How do you get that happening? How do you make people collaborate with people that they have no other reason to share oxygen with?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yeah, I think actually in some sense the emphasis on disciplinary work is kind of something that has come out of the professionalization of science. It didn’t used to be the case two centuries ago. Of course, we’ve got labs, we’ve got funding streams, et cetera. So it was all regulated. So we built this huge building, but we put a lot of interior walls. And it’s comfortable and people who criticize science are not completely wrong. We get a lot of the same. There are real barriers to collaborate, practical in terms of funding, in terms of appointments, etc. So I think this is something that is needed.
And what is driving this? So I think first and foremost, it’s the scientific challenges themselves. They often now are the interface, whether it’s like the interface of the life sciences, the material sciences, the interface of the social sciences and technology, because there you get the interesting example. So pure intellectually, I think a lot of stuff is happening. I often have this image of like plate tectonics. You have these continents and where they bump into each other, you have all the volcanoes and earthquakes, et cetera, and sometimes whole new continents emerge. So clearly, internal scientific drive is delivering, and if you see big prizes, breakthroughs, they really are happening on those interfaces.
And secondly, I think the big societal questions are in the middle. They are not totally within the realm of one scientific discipline. In fact, it comes back to this very beginning. Why do we have physics and biology? Well, it makes a difference when you want to study electrons and protons or genes and DNA or evolution. They are separate domains. But we start with the simple things and then slowly we move to the more complicated things in the middle. So I use this image of laying a jigsaw puzzle where you start on the edges or the corners. These are the easiest parts. So that’s where our disciplines lie. And now we are moving in the inside where all these disciplines meet. And actually, if we really want to deliver the results, we’ll have to do this.
And I think it’s not only interdisciplinary, it’s transdisciplinary. So there are other pieces of the puzzle that are not labeled science. They are stakeholders. There might be a lot of knowledge that is not scientific knowledge. People who study how the oceans change. Sometimes it could be the local fishermen in an island who know much more about the behavior of fish than scientists looking at satellite data. In the life sciences or in healthcare, it might be the practitioners who know how certain medicines react. So sometimes we’re totally surprised that the laboratory knowledge isn’t delivering the results because of all those local factors that we haven’t really recognized. So I think it’s both for intellectual and for practical reasons that we have to collaborate across disciplines.
Andrew Dubber
It’s really interesting you say that because this podcast is an output of an EOSC-funded project called LUMEN, which is about essentially crossing the streams between disciplines. So it’s about taking a platform that was very useful for the discovery of social sciences and humanities research and applying it and making it interoperable with mathematics, with molecular dynamics, with earth system science and trying to sort of, I guess, follow the path that has a big sign over it that says serendipity. Like there is potentially, if you cross the stream, something that isn’t just about those individual disciplines, but that actually lies between them or that connects them. Do you have a lot of faith, I guess is an odd word to use, but in serendipity?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes, I think what’s the famous line of Pasteur is that it favors the prepared mind, right? So you have to somehow be aware of it, et cetera. But a lot of the progress in science has been about applying methods, ideas from one field and exporting them to another field. I like to say the best way to get a great idea is to steal it from your neighbor.
And there are tons of examples and I sometimes worry because this kind of compartmentalization of science with a lot of the interior walls makes it more difficult. And it’s almost unavoidable if you think of science as digging these deep mines. It goes further and further down. If you’re the expert of one branch of mathematics, how can you also cover the rest of science? It’s impossible. So you think also that in the whole scientific enterprise, you need more intermediate functions or roles, people who can synthesize certain areas of science.
And so we need also more diversity in terms of those that are part of the scientific enterprise because I think you probably want to have both. You still want to have detailed domain knowledge, but you want it to be able to share with other domains. And we can do this, right? There’s no rule against it or something, but it’s, I think, important those who are research funders, who run institutions, up until the science ministers to think about this. And again, it comes to this point where I feel it’s not science is not only discovering things about the world and the things that we could possibly make, but also discovering things about science itself and how it’s structured.
Andrew Dubber
I imagine a graduate student listening to this and going, well, it’s all very well you’re talking about interdisciplinarity, but I have to choose.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
Yes.
Andrew Dubber
I have to go a next step. What would your advice be to somebody who is looking for a specialism, who has perhaps a scientific background but wants to do something that is now important, where would you look?
Robbert Dijkgraaf
First, what you should do is listen very carefully to your inner voice. Because I think you will only have a productive and enjoyable career in science if you do something that you’re truly, personally excited about. So yes, if you feel something is not resonating with you, although it’s very important, don’t do it.
But how do you know what’s out there? And so it’s very important for young people to force themselves to look around. So I always tell my students, spend at least 10% of your time on something that’s outside your domain that perhaps, if you see a lecture announced on a topic, they all hate that topic. Go to the topic. There’s even something quite perverse is that the one thing that you think you hate and as further removed from your own interest might be the thing that’s your thing. There might be some strange reverse psychology operating.
So force yourself. If you think about serendipity, it doesn’t happen spontaneous. You have to force yourself to go outside the box, expose yourself to other ideas. Always think about what did I learn from this lecture? It could be only one bit of information. What struck me? And make sure that at the end of the day, if somebody asks you, what did you learn today, you have something to tell. And if you do that, and again, be very sensitive where your own interests are, I think you’ll have a very productive career in science.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. Well, you talked about this as being part of a new renaissance. It’s not every day you get to have a conversation with the renaissance thinker. So it’s been an absolute pleasure, Robbert. I really appreciate you coming in.
Robbert Dijkgraaf
It’s a wonderful conversation. Thank you.
Andrew Dubber
Thank you. That’s Robbert Dijkgraaf, President-elect of the International Science Council, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Amsterdam and former Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science.
And that’s Inside EOSC, a podcast from the LUMEN Project, which receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme. I’m Andrew Dubber, and I’m back next month with another EOSC Insider. You can subscribe to Inside EOSC wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have enjoyed this one, a rating or a review helps other people to find it. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon. Cheers.