Lloyd Douglas said he thinks a band with only trombones would be dull.
Similarly, the program director for the National Science Foundation said diversity is key to making scientific advances.
"Have you ever looked at the sheet music for West Side Story?" the former trombone player asked a group of MSU students and faculty Thursday night. "We can't all be trombones - the band would sound pretty boring."
Lloyd Douglas' discussion, "Diversity in Science: Who Needs It?" was part of the Lyman Briggs lecture series.
He talked about greater representation of minority groups in science, including women, racial-ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
"It's a no-brainer," said Katherine Socha, a Lyman Briggs mathematics professor who attended the session. "The more and different points of view that we can bring to science, the better we will be on the whole."
Yet, Socha said she has not noticed her classes becoming more diverse in recent years.
Just more than 16 percent of MSU's student population is composed of minorities, according to 2003 preliminary enrollment numbers. But 19 percent of the entering class are minorities.
The National Science Foundation is working to increase underrepresented groups as well, Douglas said.
There are programs designed to encourage minorities to go into science and engineering, and for women to go into research and education.
"When you put us all together you have synergy," Douglas said. "You have the full utilization of individual strength."
Lyman Briggs no-preference freshman Zuie Wakade talked in her Thursday chemistry lab about how combining holistic medicinal techniques from Asian countries helped change American medicine and give patients more options.
"Diversity is so important because you find different methods to a problem," she said.
Her lab partner, Kati Shedd, agreed.
"It adds a lot, especially to science, a field that needs to have more viewpoints in it anyway," Shedd, a Lyman Briggs zoology freshman, said. "It's necessary to have more opinions in the science field."
And if scientists aren't willing to address diversity, there's an even bigger problem, Douglas said.
"If diversity isn't important to us, then we aren't important because we're a diverse group."
