A Matter of Health

Diversity in science critical to progress

By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.

You have only to look at the stories in this month's issue of From the Laboratories at Baylor College of Medicine to understand how diverse biomedical science is. And this is only a small sampling.

Yet, as I talk to scientists from various parts of the College as they discuss their work, I realize that this seeming divergence is much like a dance, where partners seem to swirl away from each other for a while and then come together again. The same occurs in science, where researchers pursue their own goals for a while, and then those goals begin to merge.

There are different schools of thought on how science should be pursued. There are those who opt for a targeted approach. They choose a particular disease and look for ways to attack that particular disease, using what is known about its genetics, its symptoms and the population it affects.

Others use a specific organism to study life itself – the activities within cells that spell out how tissues live and die. And still others restrict themselves to specific viruses or bacteria or even pathways within organisms.

There are neuroscientists, cell biologists, virologists, geneticists, imagers and even more varieties of scientists than you can imagine. And their passions in each are intense.

Occasionally, it all comes together. A particular cellular pathway may have implications for a specific virus. Or understanding how the DNA in a cell tangles and untangles may tell us something about a particularly disease or even evolution itself.

Science must be as much about passion as it is about painstaking, tedious work in a laboratory. Letting people pursue their passions – and making that possible – will give us the answers they seek and we need.