Packard’s Peace Experiment

Right up until his death two weeks ago at the age of 83, David Packard was troubled by the warfare between scientists and engineers. These two distinctly different cultures, with so much in common, are more often at each other’s throats than working hand in hand.

As we sat on the deck outside his home in Northern California’s Los Altos Hills three years ago, he talked not of the past--when he and his college buddy Bill Hewlett built their company into a high-tech empire--but of the future, and the complex problems that will bedevil us.

To solve those problems, he said, scientists and engineers will have to learn how to work together better. That may not sound like much of a problem to outsiders, but if you take a typical scientist and a typical engineer and lock them in a room together, they will spend most of their time arguing about the best way to get out.

It became, for Packard, a bit of an obsession. And he decided to do something about it.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, a spinoff of the aquarium he built for his oceanographer daughter, later became the proving ground for his theory.

He assembled a small group of talented scientists and engineers and gave them clear marching orders: to use the best engineering to develop the best instruments for probing the Earth’s last frontier--the ocean depths--about which so little is known. But the engineering was to be specifically tailored to meet precise scientific objectives.

He had not charted a simple course. In most high-tech organizations, one discipline is clearly in the driver’s seat. There is no doubt, for example, that engineers--not scientists--run the nation’s space program, which was designed chiefly to develop new technology. But in other areas, such as biomedical research, scientists tend to have the upper hand.

From the start, Packard insisted on an equal footing.

“There are very strong cultural differences between scientists and engineers,” the institute’s engineering manager, Dan Davis, told me a few days later. “That caused a lot of conflict early on.”

Scientists wanted tools designed to reach their specific goals. But to most engineers, the tool is the goal.

“Scientists,” the engineer said, “are prima donnas. They sort of have to be. They have to be very aggressive in their own autonomous little programs.”

Davis said conflicts emerged early on because the scientists at the institute tried to tell the engineers how to build the new equipment they needed. The engineers responded that they were the experts on technology and that scientists should tell them what they need and then get out of the way.

“There’s this pressure to maintain a balance, and it’s very stressful and difficult,” Davis said. Building the tools was the easy part, said Peter Brewer, a scientist and executive officer of the institute: It “pales into insignificance compared to the challenge of developing an effective hybrid culture between scientists and engineers.”

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What came of it all?

A few days ago I talked with Davis again. Packard’s mandate, he said, had turned out to be more of a challenge than anyone had anticipated, “but the vision was the right one.”

Building on the experience learned from more than 1,000 dives with its off-the-shelf unmanned submarine, the Ventana, the institute’s scientists and engineers have built a new robotic submersible that is now in final testing.

The electrically powered sub, called the Tiburon, will be much quieter than other submersibles, Davis said, and its powerful on-board computers will support a wide array of scientific sensors.

The Tiburon will transmit data back to the institute’s new $25-million research ship, the Western Flyer, which will relay the data on to a new $22-million laboratory. Much of that data will be available on the World Wide Web (www .mbari.org).

Funded by the multibillion-dollar David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the institute is committed to carrying on its founder’s experiment in peaceful coexistence between scientists and engineers. In the end, that should lead to a much richer understanding of the oceans that cover three-fourths of our planet.