A Broader View of Research

by Prof William Wang, former Chair Professor, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics and Department of Electronic Engineering

Research lies at the heart of any university that takes its mission seriously. Broadening its frontiers certainly enhances the quality of research. Furthermore, research and teaching are really two sides of the same intellectual coin - the yin and yang of knowledge. An inspired teacher is one who has directly investigated what he or she teaches, and a successful researcher is one who is eager to tell others what he or she has discovered. And in each, there is a joy for which there is no substitute. 

The development of two research streams - Genetics and Linguistics

The stories of two exceptional researchers - Gregor Mendel, a Czech monk in 19th century Brno and William Jones, an English judge in 18th century Calcutta - are good illustrations of the cumulative and interdisciplinary nature of research. Mendel's work, through his experiments with growing many generations of peas and his findings on dominant traits, formed the foundations of genetics. Jones formed the basis of modern linguistics through his recognition of the common ancestry of a group of languages.

The modest streams of research they started in genetics and in linguistics have each grown into roaring intellectual rivers, which started to flow together towards the end of the twentieth century. Their legacy is that we now have a much better idea of who we are, we the human race, and where we come from.

The cumulative nature of research

The study of language has made important progress over the last century. With the foundation Jones laid, people began the immense task of comparing languages for resemblances, and of reasoning probabilistically on the causes for these resemblances. Linguists have achieved a rough knowledge of what the 6000 languages of the world are like - their grammatical structures and their geographical distributions.

Genetics has now mapped out the human DNA sequences: by the beginning of the 21st century the entire sequence of the three billion letters of human genome had been worked out. Knowing these letters is only the beginning of learning the language - the language of the genes. We are now able to recognise a few of the over 30,000 genes in the human body. This genetic information leads to important developments in medicine, genealogy and even criminology.

This new world created by genetics was certainly not envisioned by Mendel. Yet his were the experiments that led to the avalanche of knowledge that is still building today. The lesson we can draw from this is that there is no good research that is useless. The knowledge we gain today may find immediate application tomorrow. Or it may be the basis for decades of cumulative research, which will completely change the world. The usual distinction between basic research and applied research is overly simplistic. Any work that leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves, or of the world around us, is good research, regardless of when it will impact the market.

The interdisciplinary nature of research

In The Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin suggested that we should look both at words and at genes as "a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world". This issue was not addressed until 1988 when a team of researchers at Stanford University led by Cavalli-Sforza published a tree based on genetics on the left, alongside a tree based on linguistics on the right. They showed that archaeology, genetics, and linguistics can each provide an independent and complementary window.

Only by bringing the disciplines together can we ever hope to achieve the knowledge of the ultimate origin of the human species. The big picture that is emerging with increasing clarity from the interdisciplinary research is that the most recent common ancestors of our species originated in Africa quite recently, around 100,000 years ago; and these were the peoples that invented the language from which all modern languages have sprung.

The heart of leading edge research, as can be illustrated again and again from many fields, is to make connections among seemingly disparate ideas that no one has seen before, and in so doing, deepen our understanding and broaden our research frontier. The Chinese language expresses this idea well with the word 通, which means 'connect.'

The stories of Mendel and Jones are but two of many similar stories we can find in the history of scientific research. The combined insights are beginning to tell us a lot about the ultimate origin of where we all come from. Time and again, we find that great discoveries come when we venture beyond the artificial confines of any one discipline, and combine and integrate insights across several disciplines. Perhaps the Chinese philosopher, Huainanzi, had something like this in mind, when he wrote 2000 years ago that all rivers flow into the same great ocean of human knowledge: 百川異源，而皆歸於海.