I'm doing a master's degree in science right now. I've previously worked as a telecomm engineer. I agree that there is relatively little division of labour in s

I'm doing a master's degree in science right now. I've previously worked as a telecomm engineer. I agree that there is relatively little division of labour in science, compared to engineering; or at least the labour isn't divided in the same way. I'm not convinced that this is bad, and in fact it's probably necessary. Most of the useful scientific results synthesize previous results from various fields. There are very few observations incoming that actually add to or question the prevailing theories of a given field. It seems to me from my short experience that most of the work is in reducing theories, and experimentally confirming the reductions. To be useful as a scientist, there's a good change that you'll need to be an expert in at least two things. I don't think it should be surprising that generating novel knowledge requires substantially more overhead than does acquiring and exploiting it (eg. engineering, or any practical pursuit where division of labour works so well). This may not apply to the medical research that was mentioned in the article, (the system is too complex for theoretic reduction to be useful) but I doubt that physical, ecological, mathematical, etc. sciences would progress as quickly without their practitioners having broad knowledge of their subjects.