Dannie Durand, now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, remembers sitting down to breakfast at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, during a workshop on molecular evolution. Her classmates were discussing one of their favorite single-celled organisms, radiolarians, a family of marine plankton that take on a variety of geometric forms. Durand was unfamiliar with them. "Are they protists?" she asked, referring to a class of organisms that cannot be classified as animal, plant, or fungus but that exhibit characteristics of all three.

The table went silent. "Do you work on mammals?" someone asked—perhaps the ultimate put-down from an organismal biologist.

"No, I'm a computer scientist trying to learn to be a computational biologist," Durand replied.

"Oh, that's all right then," her challenger conceded.

Biologists, computer scientists, and engineers speak different languages. Mention "vector" to a molecular biologist and a plasmid (a circular piece of bacterial DNA used in gene cloning) comes to mind. Say "vector" to an engineer, and she thinks of a mathematical concept. Similarly with "expression": To a biologist, it means protein production from a gene; to an engineer, it's an equation.

This communications divide is becoming more of a problem now that research so often requires collaboration across disciplines. One-third of the engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now work on biological problems, according to MIT biology professor Graham C. Walker. Yet it can be challenging for biology and engineering students to understand each other.

Illustration: Daniel Fazer

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