One
lion fish, one star fish, one clown fish and two other fish too in
that fish pot. All are beautiful. I learned their names from the
description posted by the side. There is a wall poster too
highlighting an interesting recent finding of that research team. The
phenomenon of changing the gender in clown fish; a male clown fish
can become a female in certain circumstances!
I’m
not in a zoo, nor in an aquarium. But I’m in the corridor outside
our lab in the Beckman Institute. Our neighboring lab is Marine
Biology, containing many fish bowls used for their experiments. They
maintain a sample aquarium on their windowsill for people like me to
see.
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| Lion Fish |
This
is Beckman Institute, which is an interdisciplinary research
institute devoted to physical sciences, engineering, biology,
behavior, cognition, neuroscience and computation. Here research
groups work within and across their own field. There can be marine
biology lab next to the signal processing lab and a brain mapping lab
near the environmental lab. This provides a facility for people
belonging to different fields so they can at least watch the research
work of others, even though they aren’t permitted to encroach upon
the work of others. People start thinking about collaborations only
if there are chances to know the difficulties or challenges in
others’ work. This is one reason why I really appreciate my
Professor (faculty associate) who takes people from different fields
like physics, electrical engineering, polymers, chemistry, bio
engineering, electronics and other fields. Selecting the host and the
host institution is very important. Fortunately, I got one best
innovator as my faculty associate.
I
haven’t found such a laboratory in any of the universities in my
country. There can be certain national labs where different
disciplines function under the same roof. But in universities
different departments function in separate buildings. We don’t even
think about the possibility of interdisciplinary research.
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| Beckman Lab; different views |
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