The video I’m going to comment on is a recording of a talk that was presented to a local audience at TEDxBoston in 2011 and it can be found in TED’s webpage. It goes by the title “Can astronomers help doctors?” and was given by Michelle Borkin, an Associate in Computer Science at Harvard University that has based her research in topics that include interdisciplinary scientific visualization and data exploration, as her twitter bio says.
She starts by questioning the viewer if they think that astronomy and medicine have anything in common. Everyone’s initial reaction is to say no. Medicine, biology, they are things that are very close to us, we have contact with it in our everyday lives whereas astronomy studies things out of our reach, things we only dreamed of for thousands of years so no, the logical answer to the question is no. Following up, with a knowing smirk, she shows us different sets of pictures, like the one we see here, each including one biomedical picture and one astronomical and she makes us mentally pick which is which. It is quite impossible to know because, as she later goes to say, raw data that comes out from biomedical machines and from radiotelescopes are very similar! That is how she and the people she was working with came up with an idea: use a radiology tool kit used to further research the data that came from, say, a brain scanner, to study a telescope’s data. They found fast and efficient results impossible to reach without instruments formerly used exclusively by doctors.
By sharing the medical technology with astronomy and vice versa they have been able to find new stars and super novas, revolutionize how you do heart diagnostics and so many other things impossible to achieve if we looked at it with the “narrow” possibilities of just one scientific field.
When we have to face something we will look at it from our own point of view. Our knowledge, our capacities. We will find challenges, things impossible to do by us but these same things will undoubtably be easy for somebody else that, with a different training, dicipline or studies, will know exactly what to do to overcome those problems. That is why Michelle says, and I agree, that it is very important to do interdisciplinary collaborations. It’s impossible to know where we will find the answers to our questions so, in every aspect of our lives where we will find hurdles, it can be incredibly useful to use this mentality.
“I urge you: attend conferences not of your own domain, read books and journals not in your own dicipline, watch TED talks and come to events like this and say hi to the neighbor sitting next to you beause you really never know where your next great idea is going to come from.”
Ana Pascual
1r BATX A
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