It is true from my own experience that systems biology in industry is very much pro multi-disciplinary and anti-inter-disciplinary. An interesting question perhaps is how doctoral training centre’s plan to train inter-disciplinary scientists for multi-disciplinary research. Perhaps emerging start-up companies in the field of systems or synthetic biology (or bioinformatics) will embrace inter-disciplinary scientists, where there aren’t sufficient specialists available in their small teams. It would be interesting to see if large multi-national corporation HR departments are planning for inter-disciplinary employees in the future.