Does becoming good at scientific research force one to become one dimensional?

Question

I'm an individual interested in multiple academic disciplines such as neuroscience, biological engineering, computer science, history, anthropology, psychology, political theory ... to name just a few. Currently, I have a normal (40 hours/week) engineering job that leaves me enough free time to follow these topics to a moderately satisfying degree.

However, primarily due to intellectual curiosity, I'm considering doing a PhD (in Europe) and would ideally want to move to research later (discipline: something along the lines of genetic engineering, computational biology or cognitive neuroscience - not sure yet, but my background is in computer science). Given the highly specialized nature of modern scientific research that seems to demand intense working hours, one concern that I have is the fear of becoming highly one dimensional: completely failing to follow progress in other fields and in society as a whole, with publish or perish environment creating an inescapable feedback loop, where one cannot afford to read articles and books on topics not related to work, or follow public debates; yet alone write a blog about e.g. social issues.

I realize there are academics out there who seem to be prolific across multiple disciplines (e.g. Chomsky, Pinker ...), but the question still stands: in a modern research environment, can one satisfy multiple intellectual interests that transcend immediate work requirements, or has the game become too competitive and focused for that? What are the main variables?

Answer 1

You can do it, but you might not be a professor. I have a PhD in Aerospace Engineering, and I work in CFD, HPC clusters, and BigData/analytics when I do research. My primary job is running the HPC department at a large-ish computing center. If I were a professor, I doubt I could pull this off. My research output is much smaller that professors my age, but I still have a pretty satisfying career.

You best chance for doing lots of different kinds of research is to find a center who appreciates you for your broad interests and to help it grow its mission while pursuing your more esoteric interests when you can.

Answer 2

The answer may vary across field and institution and continent. But based on my experience, in short, I would say: Yes, a modern research environment permits and even benefits from broad intellectual interests.

But first let's draw a distinction between what I'll call your "output" and your "input". For most researchers, research output is highly specialized. It can take an intense focus to make progress on the hardest, most impactful problems (http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/). Not only that, your progress is generally a super-linear function of the time you put into a project. You invest in learning past work, concepts tools, developing ideas often over a period of multiple years -- and then connections happen faster, ideas mature, you know the software tools, and overall you produce much more quickly. Good interdisciplinary work is possible and does allow you to use expertise in multiple areas or fields; but, in my experience, this work can be just as specialized.

Your "input", however, is an inspiration for what research to tackle. I find that my creativity in producing good research ideas is substantially better when I explicitly take time to step back and think, interact with new people, and explore new concepts. And the best researchers have a good understanding of society and gut feeling about what will be really impactful in the next few years. If you completely fail to follow progress in your field, in other fields, and in society as a whole, you might produce more papers in the short run but probably have less impactful research in the long run.

As Hamming said:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

Finally, as a professor, you have a great deal of freedom to steer your own research agenda; more than in most professions. While it's hard to make progress in wildly divergent fields concurrently, over longer timescales (5-10 years) many researchers do change their focus area quite successfully.

Answer 3

I know this question was asked a long time ago, but for future reference: I think the answer is "kind of."

The best way that I know to do this professionally is to become a "method development" person. In other words, if your job is to develop new statistical or computational tools, or to develop new instrumentation to measure things that weren't previously possible to measure, and if you are very good at striking up collaborations across different disciplines, then I think it's totally possible to remain somewhat agnostic about what exact questions you want to pursue using your new methods.

(This is adapted from something a previous advisor said to me, which is that you can be a "methods" or a "problem" person. At the "problem" end of the spectrum, to contrast with the above, you would be motivated by a really specific question, would understand it better than anyone else, and would be more willing to use a wide variety of methods to study it. It can be a good exercise to look at people's careers and try to see where they fall on this spectrum.)

The caveat is that in order to do this successfully, you're still going to need to go "narrow and deep" at the PhD level in something like applied math, statistics, algorithms, etc.; otherwise it's going to be very hard to do work that is cutting-edge enough to genuinely matter across a variety of applications. Doctoral work is all about making a unique contribution; if your knowledge doesn't take you "right up to the edge" of any field, that's going to be really difficult. You will also likely have to cede a little control in terms of choosing questions, because you won't always be able to shoehorn an existing interest around your analytic specialty. But if you want a lot of variety in a tenure-track academic career, I think this is your best bet.