Collaboration in Science | Tea Break | with Amor Sciendi
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- čas přidán 9. 09. 2019
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Is science done by just one person, or is is a collaboration? Let's grab a mug of tea and chat about it!
Sources:
Fleming and Penicillin: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
2003 Collaboration Study: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/p...
Guardian Article: www.theguardian.com/science/o...
Authorship Study: asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
Scientific American Article: blogs.scientificamerican.com/...
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I’m a grad student at a Chem department and do collaborative work with a group in the Microbiology department. I get trained and get to perform my own experiments along with their group instead of simply handing them my compounds (which would be no real collab work). So I’m grateful for this collaborative opportunity BUT...I was more amazed at how THREE PI’s actually shared ONE SAME big lab space!! This was the case for the Nutrition, Microbiology, Bio department. I think it was a great decision made by them. One step to a more collaborative nature in doing science :)
I love that this topic is being covered in not just any collab, but a collab between art and science. It's too often that I see those fields cast as butting heads or being mutually exclusive in a given space and it's great to see that trend broken, even if only for a little while. It'll accumulate.
An excellent tea break! I'm not a scientist but I've overheard many members of the scientific community discussing this for several decades. Professor Emeritus Dr. David Hestenes, PhD mentions it in a paper on Geometric Algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics. In particle physics it's so old-hat people make jokes about the number of authors on papers. It's like the movie credits for "The Lord of the Rings". Edwin T. Jaynes mentions feeling strange writing in the first person as well. Then I recalled two controversies in astrophysics and architecture involving a tradition of ascribing intellectual property rights to principal investigators and ages long conflicts over propriety, who was first and multiple rediscoveries.
I was strongly reminded of "Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge" by Robert Root-Bernstein as well as "Sparks of Genius" by the same author and Michele Root-Bernstein.
P.S. old Japanese saying, if you can handle it: If it's too hot for your hands it's too hot for your lips.
I think a pretty good "rocket moment" for biology would be the completion of the human genome project. According to wikipedia, it remains the largest collaborative effort in biology, and it MAPPED THE ENTIRE GENOME OF THE HUMAN SPECIES! HOW COOL IS THAT!
That's a good point. It was "completed" (we're still learning so much more about the human genome even now!) in 2003, so I was 13/14. I don't really remember there being much press that I personally saw, though I would imagine that there was lots of news about it. I'll have to go back and look into how it was covered at the time!
It's still being mapped, a large portion of it we don't know what it does, we did sequence the whole thing though and that's no small feet I even on one of the machines that did this and it's ancient.
@@AlexDainisPhD Really late to the party here, but I somehow got signed up for something related to The Human Genome Project as a teenager. I received what looked like marketing materials in the mail - a large purple trifold folder/box with info and a DVD inside. It was clearly meant for adults and/or a classroom. I remembered the name of it, but not much about anything inside (sorry) because I was more interested in the "fancy" packaging. That one accidental piece of mail led to a career in graphic design :)
In ecology you need to work with people across the world. Animals and plants don't pay attention to borders so if they're migrating or it's an invasive species you have to work with people in other countries. Organisations like BirdLife international which work with local organisations are a great example. Also there are a lot of international conventions on migrating species, particularly birds, which require collaboration to research and maintain.
Ecology also requires a lot of collaboration outside of academia. Often problems are as a result of humans so you have to work with organisations like the local water board or construction companies to tackle problems. I'm about to start a research project on invasive species with my local water company.
My background is in peptide and DNA nanotech so it tends to be a lot of people working on a big project from different departments and specializations, not only because of knowledge backgrounds and the benefit of data, but also because of material resources, not every lab has both a DNA synthesizer, a peptide synthesizer, a quadrupole high-end mass spectrometer, and a supercomputer to analyze computational data. I love your points, they're all great, HOWEVER, some fields do allow the caveat of the lone scientist to thrive, those tend to be more on the theoretical chemistries and physics where a grad student or PI could stay at their desk all night doing the groundwork and building the tower too. The same is for more computational or "dry-lab" sciences but it doesn't mean that either research dynamic is impossible or selfish/leaching. I love your videos!
You're my role model🥰
I can relate to the fact that when writing, it feels wrong to use the first person singular, I always tried to use first person plural to "make the reader feel included". In my masters my advisor managed what what I did and the contacted two colleagues from Germany and Russia, the paper that arose was part my work and theirs, bundled in to 17 pages of results 😆. Collaboration is now essential; I'll start my PhD soon and I will join a project from 3 professors I haven't personally met!
You make some great points. :) I'm working on a Masters in Biological Science (Ecology), and found recently that myself and other students were taken aback when told that we could collaborate on a particular project, but submit individual reports. The rules against plagiarism and collusion -- which are required to prevent cheating -- have given us all the mindset that we have to work on every problem alone.
Many scientists cite Star Trek as the source of their inspiration. Ironically, Star Trek regularly had Dr. McCoy single handedly curing exotic diseases. And who can forget Zefram Cochrane converting an ICBM into a warp capable spaceship?
There was a reference to STEM fields in your video, dragging math into the discussion. I have no idea what the norm in mathematics is now, but in the early '80s a professor of mathematics of my acquaintance considered collaboration to be a lesser form of publishing mathematics.
The first example of a discovery that occurred to me was Watson and Crick discovering the form of the DNA molecule, all the while squeezing out Rosalind Franklin.
These are all really good points! Star Trek is a super interesting one, because I feel like there were definitely moments like single-handed disease curing, but I also think there was some really great modeling of how to work as an effective team from the overall crew. Lots of unique skillsets all coming together to drive a mission forward!
As a soon to become a natural sciences student I find this video so important! Thank you for reminding me what this world I'm about to step in looks like
To recognize a team rather to a single person makes me thing in the perception of people that would feel encouraged or not to be part of a endeavor like the one being recognized. It may be a shift in the way we think as a society; switch from wanting to be the one being recognized to be part of the team that is being recognized.
How the Nobel prize for example would need to change the way they do this recognition in order to truly include everyone involved.
I think science has tackled most of the easy stuff that could be figured out on your own. Most projects today, require larger teams to really tackle. Of course, there are many studies in many fields that require no such large team still. But those wont get nobels.
And of course there's the fact that unless someone is born in a cave and abandoned at birth, nobody starts figuring out and discovering everything from scratch, they first learn lots of things that others have done before them before getting to new discoveries ("on the shoulders of giants"). Thanks to the Internet, communication around the whole world is now faster and easier and more efficient than ever which makes collaboration much more common (including on CZcams).
recently subscribed and already a new video, how cool is that!
and you know what's cooler? I was thinking about the same topic these days, and this might be weird but watching Bones (TV series) reinforced this concept of collaboration between scientists to me. I think it's essential and even effective, because having a group of people whom experts in one particular area working on a broad problem make it covered from all angels (I don't know if i put that right..)
*early for your tea and of course a* *heart* 🙂❤
I wonder how this varies with between the experimental and theoretical fields and with the scale of the discovery. When a new paradigm is needed it's hard for theoreticians to collaborate because their peers either don't understand the new theory or don't want to work on something that doesn't agree with experiment, Paul Dirac famously talked about that.
Another interesting example are the Polymat projects which are attempts to further mathematical theory with open collaboration of a huge number of people and lead by Terence Tao. They do succeed in finding some interesting ideas and methods but the really big advancements so far have only come from the small group of the best mathematicians like Tao and his colleagues.
This is a fantastic video!
I've been wrestling with this as well. I write about science and it's research, and I've been trying to make a conscious effort to show collaboration when I make a narrative about research.
many professor jobs in academia is to write grant proposals. A lot of them stopped doing technical works but manage their postdocs and grad students.
For scientific discoveries, personally, I don't think of a person or just a group of people.
I perceive scientific dicoveries as these results from which different generations gathered and accumulated through different periods of time and technology being mashed up into one pile of summarized paper.
Science is amazing.
Hello Alex! I'm currently doing a postdoc in Physics. I usually work in small collaborations, like 2 to 4 people directly, and also have projects which I work alone. I think that this mindset of 'lone genious' is culturally present and strong, and I think it's harmful. I would even say that the way the Nobel Prize awards, by just selecting a few researchers, kind of feeds this mindset. Coincidently, my collegues and I recently discussed about this at lunch. We agreed that a better way to award a discovery should take into account somehow the collaborations and labs. It seems that the criteria on how to properly award would be a complex problem to solve, though.
It's really similar in videogame development. It often takes a lot of people to get a game done but only a few percent of the developers in a project get noticed in press. Usually being the game designer or the music composer.
when you asked: how do I think of when talking about scientific discoveries?
the first thing my mind went to was ligo and the black hole picture ie the discovery not the teams behind them but when you gave some famous examples like penicillin or radiation
it went directly to the photo of flaming in my old textbook (i didn't remember his name so I guess it's the closest thing in my brain) and Marie curie and her husband.
"The most fun is to be had not alone, but together" - well, that's due to human nature as a social being, so we all need each other.
An interesting example for biology collaboration would be the organization of a bioblitz, or exploration teams going to Antarctica (should watch the anime: "a place further than the universe")
I will look into both of these!
. @AlexDainisPhD Would you be interested in restoring the GULO gene to Humans on Mars? Even just advising the research A.I. once a month would help. Just curious.
A relatively recent big biology team project: the rush to the human genome sequencing (and the competition vs. craig venter)
Thanks for this. Always learn a thing or two watching your videos. This got me thinking about standing on the shoulders of giants. I bet even Einstein had some unrecognised colleagues who bounced a few ideas around.
Even those great minds that did discoveries all of their own had an assistant or two, who usually just didn't show up in history. Nobody can go at it alone, or they end up being a weird professor with no connection to reality (and what is science about, if not reality)
In my opinion, the rise of collaboration in science is more relevant for practical research rather than for theoretical fields. Modern experimental hardware is too complex and expensive for single scientist to afford. Bright discoveries in math, at the same time, mostly requires nothing but smart brain. And they are still being made today by individuals. Unfortunately, such a discoveries are rather specific and aren't so impressive for general public. As for me, i think that collaborative effort is always good. Two heads are better than one!
I remember this being done artificially with that photograph of a black hole, which was actually done by a diverse team of about 160 or 180 researchers, but then several media put one woman in the front and acted as if she were the one person who crated that photograph, while there actually was a huge team involved. As if it mattered for scientific discoveries of which gender (or sex? I never get the difference) the scientist is, and not the discorvery itself, no matter if it was done by someone identifying as a little green smudge of goo or as a man/woman/chair/tablecloth/pen/whatever.
other side of the coin, does that imply modern scientists are less independent? less able to do the work by themselves? or they can, but just takes longer? or maybe they are less likely to have the experience of figuring it out by themselves.
I couldn't be a scientist, I'm not a team player, I work alone.
Heh, I half expected the tea to still be too hot at the end.
I hope scientists will understand that their Erdős number isn't everything ;)
I just paused the video as soon as you just finished the question.
I picture a crazy lab genius in a cave with thousands of genetically modified servants with huge screens and robotic arms (not sure why he needs the genetic spawns if there's robots, anyway) and nuclear rods everywhere with few rockets and tons of weapons, but hey... that's what DC and MARVEL teach us, the "bad people" have PhD's and crazy labs, while the "good guys" get super power by been bitten by a spider (spiderman) or you can be a "vigilante" and a hero as long as you're rich (batman) otherwise, you're an idiot/bigot protecting the border (minute man), that sort of imagination I have.