My Unexpected Journey in Applied Biomathematics

Abstract

Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), the most common avoidable human birth defect, is the extensive irreversible brain damage caused by heavy prenatal alcohol exposure. Following the discovery of FAS in 1973, a multidisciplinary research community began applying discipline-specific methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying FAS and its consequences for the victims’ cognition and social behavior. An academic biomathematician and statistician, since 1984 I have collaborated with one American research group studying this condition.

First we examined mainly these patients’ behavioral deficits, but more recently we have been pursuing an interdisciplinary “endophrenology,” the correlated brain abnormalities and behavioral problems among these patients. As the research has become more interdisciplinary, it has become better science, with deeper implications for social medicine, but at the same time its reception by our colleagues has become steadily more negative. This essay, in the form of a memoir, reviews the new quantitative techniques we contributed to the research community so our research could go forward, and also the estrangement that each successive innovation engendered between our group and the same research community. There are implications here for how the field of science and technology studies construes and recounts novelties of quantitative interdisciplinary bioscience.