On the eve of another BioSynC synthesis meeting–a meeting on global climate change starts this Monday–we have a moment to step back and reflect on this distinctive way of doing science. What are synthesis meetings, exactly? And why do we host them again? The following is a transcript of an interview I conducted with Dr. Mark Westneat, director of BioSynC.
What do you see as the main benefit of a biodiversity synthesis center (BioSynC) that hosts interdisciplinary meetings in biodiversity science?
Mark: I think hosting meetings is actually a means to an end, with the goal being new ideas, new approaches to tackling thorny problems that are difficult to address using current data sets and current technology. We want to use synthesis meetings to push EOL toward solutions for some of the long-standing problems in biology: phylogenetic visualization, biogeography, using informatics for conservation biology…We also anticipate and have experienced that new questions pop up all the time at meetings, which is a really exciting part of having them.
What do you think it is about biodiversity science that so demands synthesis?
Mark: NESCent and NCEAS (National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis) have hit on two of the really integrative, multi-faceted disciplines of biology that need synthesis: evolution and ecology. Multi-species interactions, historical factors—very complex scientific questions. Synthesis benefits that greatly. I think biodiversity science is at an interface between evolution and ecology, but just the knowledge of how many species there are on Earth and what their names are—really basic knowledge—is woefully unknown. Until we know it, and can develop good online resources for it, that hinders what NESCent and some of these other synthesis centers are trying to do. It also hinders conservation biology. That lack of biodiversity information is a sort of ball-and-chain that slows science down. So I think one of the big benefits of the EOL and the synthesis we do with it and for it is to speed science up by collecting that basic information and making it available for research, to answer that perplexing question we have now and move on to the next one.
How are BioSynC meetings distinct from the NESCent models they are based on?
Mark: Well, all our meetings have the common theme of using or contributing to the EOL to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, which is unique. They may be focused on building a completely different database. The first meeting we had here, on Bryozoans, was run by Scott Lidgard. He was basically building BryoZone, this other database, but we knew it was going to be a partner with EOL, that it would directly feed into EOL and enable research.
At what stage are you at in a scientific problem when most meetings are convened?
Mark: Ah, at various stages. Taxonomic problems—for example taxonomy of flies, or of decapod crustaceans—tend to be more mature; all the people in the room are experts in a group within that clade. Most of them know each other already and the pathway to resolving taxonomic problems is pretty clear. These meetings are really important for the EOL because they make possible research on diverse content aggregated in one place.
In some of the other meetings, where the questions are more raw, I think the participants argue a bit more, even about what the important question is. For example, the tree viz meeting had software developers, corporate representatives, and computational and taxonomic biologists. I think there was a lot of mind-expansion and enlightenment going on, with the participants really listening to and challenging one another. So meetings come in different flavors.
Describe the structure of a typical synthesis meeting.
Mark: They vary, but the typical large meeting starts with individual talks to get everyone up to speed on each other’s perspectives. You don’t want to spend too much time giving these talks, because that’s not really synthesis. After every one knows each other, then you break out into discussion groups and start to synthesize, to debate, ask what the data sets are, and who’s going to do what. We ask participants to sign up for tasks that will continue beyond the synthesis meeting itself. Many meetings have a section where they outline a paper or grapple with the nitty-gritty of outlining a grant proposal on the topic. This really focuses your thinking: ‘how will we address the key question in a 15 page NSF grant?’ At each stage we encourage people to think about how what they’re doing interfaces with the EOL.
How do you feel about the public perception of scientists as workers in isolation, making discoveries through flashes of insight? How do synthesis meetings come in here?
Mark: I love being hidden in my lab by myself, because I do so many meetings and interviews like this one [laughs]. Being in the lab is an important part of science. But synthesis meetings are equally important: that’s where you get new ideas, cross-fertilization of disciplines, and you can then go back to your lab with a new idea you got from meetings. I think that makes your science better, but you still have to go back the lab and pursue it. It can be a bit lonely, but I think synthesis meetings—camaraderie, group effort—make up for that. Some of the best ideas that come out of synthesis meetings come from standing around the coffee pot or at the restaurant with a bottle of wine, or after the meeting, or in between official sessions. That’s often when the real deals, the real ideas get hashed out.
What do you consider products of a successful meeting?
Mark: Really, the most important product is enthusiasm and the trading of ideas on how to advance biodiversity research using the EOL. In terms of tangible products: grant proposals, publications that come out of collaborations, species page content that enables current and future research, researchers signing up for curation of species pages or life-desks to funnel content, regional EOLs. We had a meeting in Fiji where there was a group of people working to contribute to a regional EOL down there; we developed grants and papers on biogeography and conservation, talked about student training and local involvement, and they also translated the EOL video into Fijian.
What are your thoughts on the future of synthesis meetings?
Mark: We are grassroots, so we are driven by what the community wants to do. We have our favorite themes: phylogeny, biogeography, conservation. But plans for synthesis meeting on the depictions of biodiversity in art are very exciting to me because I think one of the most promising ways to have intellectual breakthroughs is where we’re blending biodiversity with some other area of human endeavor, like art or music or history or linguistics. Those kinds of image collections might be really interesting in the context of EOL. There might be papers written on the history of some particular kind of species art that hadn’t been tracked before just because we haven’t collected all the images in one place. The EOL’s going to collect a lot of stuff in one place which will be available and searchable. And then it’ll be sort of like ‘aha, look at that!’ [Laughs] That’s what we’re after—that ‘aha’ moment.
One tool that the BoA team has developed is LigerCat. LigerCat is a tool that helps people search the biomedical literature at PubMed/Medline (National Library of Medicine’s database of articles) and see the results as a tag cloud of biomedically relevant terms. We have used LigerCat to find and display terms for species in EOL. For instance here is the tag cloud for articles related to polar bears (Ursus maritimus ):
We released 
