I was suggesting some training not a full double act--like they do with astronauts.
What we have here is not an inability for one person to learn two tasks.
What we have here is two totally different ways of organizing a project.
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The space station way:
Colonel Winters -- George, we've decided you'll learn Russian for this fifteen minute docking sequence. You'll be starting an eight month course in intensive Russian at Monterrey next Monday.
George -- Yessir.
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The biological research way;
Dr. Witherspoon -- Oh. I understand we transfer all the equipment in Los Dogos Perdue. Does anybody here speak Spanish?
Grad Student One -- I took Spanish in High School. I got a 'B'.
Grad Student Two -- I knew a girl from Baja once.
Dr. W. -- Good. You two are in charge of the bags. And, for God's sake, remember to bring a Spanish dictionary. Now, about the Riechenbackker staining procedure ...
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Research guys who go on these trips are like ...
dedicated ...
to their fly maggots or lepidoptera or sea slugs or whatever it is.
It is their life.
They are not, willingly, going to leave their beloved slugs to go waste a year studying psychology.
Who is going to
tell Dr. Witherspoon, or Dr Stanton or Dr Yelling to leave his work in marine algae, tidal flux, or whale dentition and go study water chemistry?
Which they will learn just enough about to be somebody else's lab technician?
-- Why would they do it?
-- Who is going to pay for that training?
-- Who is going to make up for the time they lose when they're not writing tenure track papers in their own field?
-- The grant they get from the university does not have anything to do with water chemistry, only whale dentition. The folks who wrote that grant are going to be annoyed if the time and materials they pay for are wasted on water chemistry.
-- Now you could set it up this way. If Dr. Witherspoon is putting together a crew and he has four or five grad students at hand and part of his project needs water chemistry, he may order his sea slug grad student, (studying, not resembling, one hopes,) to learn some water analysis and run those tests. He might tell everyone they have to take a red cross course.
But demand that a grad student take a year to learn nursing or psychology so he'd get picked to go on an expedition -- no responsible and honest adviser would do that to his student.
