Stem Cells for Collaboration

In recent years, cross-disciplinary research has become cutting edge among the world’s leading scholarly institutions. Harvard’s leadership is well aware of the growing trend, and last week took a significant step to foster such coordination between its faculties: The Harvard Corporation has announced that it is creating Harvard’s first University-wide department, the Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology.

The University-wide department promises to bring together faculty from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), encouraging collaboration and streamlining Harvard’s resources for stem cell research. The new department will collaborate with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), which currently facilitates University-wide investigation in the field, but it will be better able to centralize resources for stem cell research than the Institute could alone, in particular gaining the power to hire its own faculty.

The Corporation established the new department with impressive speed, despite its radical departure from the University’s traditionally decentralized paradigm. The University Planning Committee on Science and Engineering (UPCSE) only recommended the department’s creation four months ago in the committee’s final report. The committee also recommended a University-wide Systems Biology department, a field which combines physics and computational science to investigate how biological systems, such as cells, operate.

But Harvard should go beyond encouraging cooperation across scientific disciplines; it should look also to coordinate its faculties and resources in other emerging fields, such as neuroeconomics. Further, there is no reason to limit the efforts to establishing new departments. This page has frequently advocated for the creation of a center for energy studies, modeled after HSCI.

In addition to research-specific collaboration, Harvard–or more specifically, President-elect Faust—should encourage broader coordination between its various schools. Harvard is already doing this to some extent. Just last week, the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Harvard Business School (HBS) announced that they would be offering a new joint degree. Further, HBS has been paying increasing attention to the business aspects of science, which could lead to collaboration between HBS and HMS or FAS.

The development of the new Allston campus provides almost unprecedented opportunity to facilitate such inter-faculty cooperation by bringing many erstwhile isolated schools into close proximity. As interdisciplinary collaboration becomes increasingly important in the academic world, the Corporation and central leadership should continue to make it a priority for Harvard and actively develop new means to facilitate and improve infrastructural support for collaboration among its faculties.