How Expert Weavers Helped NASA Solve a Critical Apollo Problem

How Expert Weavers Helped NASA Solve a Critical Apollo Problem

In the 1960s, NASA engineers faced a major obstacle in building the Apollo spacecraft: the guidance computer was too large to launch. They solved it by enlisting expert weavers who hand-wired binary memory using needles and thread. This example highlights how combining expertise from different fields can lead to impactful discoveries. Studies show that research involving unusual collaborations is more likely to be cited and win Nobel Prizes. Despite their critical role, the weavers were initially overlooked but later honored. The video emphasizes the value of transdisciplinary research in tackling complex problems.
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What Happens When Scientists Work With Unexpected Experts. | Transcript:

In the 1960s, NASA's engineers were building the Apollo spacecraft. But they ran into a major problem that almost prevented them from getting to the moon. To solve it, they brought in some unexpected help: expert weavers. Hi, I'm Cameron, and this is MinuteEarth. Engineers and weavers sound like an odd collab - and we'll get back to it in more detail soon! - but it turns out that lots of perplexing problems can be solved by bringing together unexpected groups of experts. Like, linguists teamed up with geneticists to study the relationship between language and genes in various groups of people to help figure out where in Africa homo sapiens arose, and which paths we took as we spread out from there.

Experts in fluid dynamics teamed up with world class surfers to figure out that you need wind blowing in from offshore to produce the very best barrel waves. Experts in epidemiology teamed up with experts in sewage management to test lots and lots of poop for viruses all at once in order to create an early warning system for the spread of COVID. And experts in the human genome once teamed up with a famous expert in partying to study his DNA in order to learn that some people have genetic mutations that allow them to detoxify alcohol much faster than others. And the value of teamwork isn't just anecdotal: one study of nearly 18 million scientific papers

found that when researchers from unusual combinations of fields work together, their research tends to be more impactful, at least in terms of how often it's cited. And big scientific breakthroughs, like the ones that are awarded Nobel Prizes, are particularly likely to bring together different fields and research methods. But getting experts from very different fields to work together to solve problems isn't always easy; we don't necessarily know what expertise might be needed for a given problem. Plus, people who work in different fields often have very different cultures and methodologies - and even vocabularies! And then there's the issue of not always giving all contributors the respect and credit they

deserve: for example, the weaving experts helped get us to the moon by enabling NASA to shrink the size of the Apollo Guidance computer so that it could actually be launched into space. They did this by meticulously weaving the hardwired binary computer memory by hand by passing a needle attached to a wire back and forth either through or around the tiny rings in the core memory module; when they went through the ring, it encoded a one; and when they went around, it encoded a zero. And despite their ingenious deployment of skill and their critical role in the success of the moon landings, they were almost completely

ignored by NASA and the press as Americans celebrated the successful mission. It wasn't until very recently that at least some of the weavers were appropriately honored. So it's not a given that we can always get the right experts to work together to solve our toughest problems. But when we do manage to bring strong threads of knowledge together, we can weave solutions to some of the biggest problems on Earth. Or even the moon. To make this video, we worked with the Han lab at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies and the Kramer lab at the University of South Florida. For them, partnerships like I just described are an absolute must in order to get anything done.

For example, Dr. Barbara Han is a Disease Ecologist whose work focuses on predicting when and where new diseases are likely to appear. But doing that requires working with not only virologists who have expertise in how viruses enter animal cells (Dr. Michael Letko at WSU), but animal biologists who are experts in how animals behave, computer scientists who can design AI models to better understand how viruses affect proteins (Dr. Payel Das at IBM Watson), and computational modelers like Dr. Kramer who can take all the data and build predictive simulations with it. It's called transdisciplinary research, and it is a huge part of how important modern, cutting-edge science like their work gets done. Thanks Dr. Han and Dr. Kramer!

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