Path Talk

Commentary by
David B. Roth, Irene Diamond Professor of Immunology and Chair of the Department of Pathology

Introducing PathTalk
January 14, 2008

Welcome to the new NYU Department of Pathology web site. This section, PathTalk, is envisioned by our web team as a regular column to provide brief notes on news and ideas that might be of interest to our "target audience." But who is our audience? For that matter, who are "we"? Taking the long view, we are broadly defined by our mission—the familiar triad of patient care, education, and research. But our community comprises an astonishing variety of perspectives, needs, and interests: pathologists, research scientists, referring physicians, the lay public, patients, residency applicants, the NYU School of Medicine community, faculty recruits, fellowship applicants, potential graduate and medical students, and many others. Each of these groups has a different knowledge base, different outlooks, and, often, very different vocabularies.

This diversity, in part, mirrors a trend toward specialization that has produced an enormous body of knowledge over the past two hundred years. The working paradigm in science during this period has been reductionism, and it has worked very well. It is now unthinkable that anyone could attempt, say, to write a comprehensive treatise on philosophy, metaphysics, physics, and biology, as Descartes did in his Le Monde (and in a mere four years!). One unfortunate consequence, however, has been increasingly thick barriers to communication between disciplines. If not balanced by integrative educational efforts, the fragmentation of knowledge can obscure the "big picture."

How can we deal with the side effects of hyper-specialization? How do we, as a combined research and clinical department promote the integration of scientific inquiry and clinical medicine in order to re-establish a larger perspective? In the months to come, I'll explore these topics and propose a few answers to these questions.