Aside from the appeal to administrators as a tool to reduce costs by combining less robust departments with heftier relations, interdisciplinarity is a powerful idea because it implies that different branches of knowledge can benefit from talking to one another: a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building blocks to a seamless edifice. True interdisciplinarity would steer clear of amateurism and intellectual voyeurism, subjecting disciplines and the rules by which they operate to a thorough scrutiny, and it would require scholars to listen to those critiques. What is seen in practice, however, writes Davis, rarely meets this ideal because so-called interdisciplinary courses are taught by people trained in one discipline who are essentially amateurs in the other. A truly interdisciplinary approach is potentially dangerous: some kinds of knowledge might refute or negate other kinds of knowledge. For example, if the advances the humanities have made over the past 20 years in developing complex ideas about race are applied them to medical research, much of the work already done on disease and ethnicity might have to change. That is because the current research standard in medicine and medical research for assessing race is based on simple self-reporting. The interrogation of race in the humanities and social sciences indicates that race is a complex and multifaceted social construction, not easily translated to a check-off box. Interpreting literature in a historical context involves a rather different set of assumptions from those used in interpreting history. Historians tend to think of culture as history, while literary types tend to think of history as culture. Another way of saying this is that historians see texts as facts, while non-historians see facts as texts. So, being truly interdisciplinary means being willing to let go of what you know so well and free-fall into what is only beginning to be formulated. Davis is currently working on Project Biocultures, an effort to bring together science, medicine, technology, and culture to see how they are all inter-related. The project team is finding that is much easier to want to link those diverse disciplines together, than to find scholars who can talk about and do collaborative research on how those areas of knowledge interrelate. Discussions have been enlightening, but fundamental problems remain. Although the entire team agrees that they all make interpretations, for example, the scientists have stuck with the idea that data are the most important thing, and "the data is the data." Team members on the humanities side question that notion, wishing to introduce the concept that social, cultural, and political forces can create and shape the data, claiming that the interpretation itself can make the data, or that the data aren't as solid as they look. In such an environment, the notion of hard facts on the one hand and the idea of social construction on the other cannot seamlessly merge into each other. A more sophisticated interdisciplinarity might mean coming up with new disciplines altogether that the traditional divide between the cultures of science and the humanities might have to break down, creating a very different look for knowledge.