A necessary interdisciplinary approach

A necessary interdisciplinary approach

The idea of ​​university presupposes the notion of confluence of knowledge. In the modern sense, the origin of the university can be traced back to the medieval corporation, but it is legitimate to attribute to it, at least in spirit, older roots in the great source of inspiration for Western thought: Greece. With this in mind, let us indulge in the incredible exercise of imagining that, over the course of a few years, in Athens, it would be plausible to hear Socrates, in a public space, raise the problems that still form the basis of our reflections; or Plato, with his students, in the school he created, whose name is confused with the very ideal of the search for knowledge: Academy; or, even, the wise man from Stagira, Aristotle, whose school received the no less symbolic name of Lyceum. In these spaces, many topics were discussed, which can be grouped into various categories: ethics, politics, metaphysics, poetics, rhetoric, as well as elements of what we today proudly call science. There was, therefore, a patent interdisciplinarity, very natural, in fact, in the eternal alternation between unity and multiplicity – a game of chiaroscuro so well known to those who have the audacity to seek knowledge (sapere aude)! “Interdisciplinarity” was not, then, a word ad usum Delphini, an adornment for speeches by university leaders and scientific directors of funding agencies; it was a beautiful and perplexing fact, like a sea that a sailor observes, still, in the port of departure.

Alas, in our time, universities have been domesticated, and the model advocated by university bureaucrats – and consecrated by their practice – is that of an institution that “pays for itself”, that generates foreign currency, that boasts “subsidiary companies”. What a sad sight it is to see a university that walks on tiptoe and begs for its right to exist. A university like this, the hegemonic public university in our country, is a vision as grim as, to use an image from Schopenhauer, that of a Pegasus forced to toil under the weight of a yoke.

In such a discouraging reality, interdisciplinarity acquires the value of an instrument of struggle, of a wake-up call in the face of the alienation brought about by the model that equated intellectual activity with a productive task and transformed the academic, first, into a fierce specialist, and then into a scientific entrepreneur. At a time when technology has become little more than a means to fascinate (and exploit) the masses, science shows clear signs of stagnation and even trivialization, and fundamentalism threatens to subvert the modus faciendi academic, interdisciplinarity provides a way to reinvigorate the university and a basis for building a truly humanist education – a healthy and necessary form of subversion.

The construction of an authentic interdisciplinarity, however, is an enormous challenge from the point of view of research and teaching practices. With few exceptions, our curricular structures are obsolete and crystallize a compartmentalization that, although useful for a university that has the duty to feed the “job market” with graduates, contributes little to stimulating thinking as a means of comprehensive and liberating education. In view of this scenario, it is important to applaud efforts such as those of professors Sergio Russo Matioli and Diego Trindade de Souza, authors of Introduction to Bioinformatics, from the Unicamp Press.

As the authors rightly point out in their text, the relationship between computing and biology was noted and explored by computer science pioneers such as Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and John von Neumann. Today, it is natural and necessary to understand molecular biology and genetics as areas organically linked to data science. The analytical capacity provided by digital computers and machine learning models is an indispensable tool in the face of the stupendous complexity of the mechanisms essential to life.

The book by professors Matioli and Souza is a valuable contribution to helping students of life sciences understand the foundations of digital computing and the enormous benefits it can bring to research in this area. After an introductory chapter on the idea of ​​bioinformatics, the authors present three chapters focused on basic topics in computing, covering both elements of hardware how much of with . These chapters allow students who have not had systematic training in these topics to understand the modus operandi of digital machines and can thus deal with the computational elements of bioinformatics from a broader and richer perspective. The authors then discuss in depth issues such as the alignment of macromolecule sequences, phylogenetics, phylogenomics, motifs and structures of nucleic acids and polypeptides, and proteins. Finally, they point out development prospects in the area, which establishes a bridge between training and the research challenges that readers may experience if they wish to follow the path of systematic investigation in the area. Finally, it is worth noting that the book is the result of the authors' teaching experience – this makes its organization a solid basis for teachers from our country and other countries in the Portuguese-speaking community to build their courses on the subject.

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Romis Attux is a professor at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Feec) at Unicamp.