We hail individual geniuses, but success in science comes through collaboration

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 1, 2017 at 10:27:24 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] We hail individual geniuses, but success in science comes through collaboration
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> We hail individual geniuses, but success in science comes through collaboration
> This week’s Nobel winners will have drawn on teams, often multinational, now threatened by Brexit
> By Jeremy Farrar
> Sep 30 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/30/we-hail-individual-geniuses-success-in-science-collaboration-nobel-prize>
>
> When we think of famous scientists, we think of Albert Einstein, perhaps Marie Curie or Francis Crick. More recently, 
> there’s Peter Higgs, known for the Higgs boson, Andre Geim for graphene or John O’Keefe for his work on the GPS 
> systems in our brains. Though they span vastly different scientific disciplines, they all have one thing in common – 
> they are all Nobel prize winners.
>
> Nobel laureates give a human face to science, a discipline that can often seem anonymous to those who aren’t directly 
> involved. They are great figures in history whose discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe and 
> in many cases improved our lives in ways that cannot be overestimated.
>
> So when the 2017 Nobel prizes are awarded, we will once again celebrate individuals who have thought differently, 
> taken risks with their work and, in doing so, have made huge leaps forward.
>
> But there is also a danger when the Nobels are such a prominent way of celebrating science. Even lone geniuses – 
> Einstein working in a patent office, for instance – are a product of their scientific environment and times, building 
> on work done by others and benefiting from feedback from their colleagues. If we rely too heavily on the narrative 
> that science is the history of great men and – too seldom – great women, we underestimate how much it is a result of 
> team work and partnerships.
>
> Today, even in the individual labs of most leading scientists, the results are invariably born of a joint effort. 
> Anyone who has been to a conference cannot have missed the slides at the end of nearly every presentation that credit 
> the whole team – from technician, to PhD student, to eminent professor. On an even larger scale, think of the 
> jubilant mission control room of the Mars Curiosity rover; the thousands of collaborators at Cern who validated the 
> existence of the Higgs boson; or the international teams that over 13 years sequenced the first human genome. These 
> stories are powerful too.
>
> And if we look towards some of the great challenges of our time – tackling the problem of clean and sustainable 
> energy, providing sufficient food for a growing planet, developing new genetic technologies to improve health, or 
> harnessing the power of the digital revolution, we start to see how difficult it will be for any one individual to 
> take any of them on alone. The same is true for fundamental science such as understanding the working of the brain or 
> the origin of the universe.
>
> Collaboration brings fresh ideas and new perspectives. Bringing people together from diverse backgrounds, often 
> across borders, leads to new ways of thinking, better solutions and faster progress.
>
> We need to celebrate this collaboration more than ever, because it doesn’t happen on its own. It needs an environment 
> that encourages researchers to build international and interdisciplinary teams, to work in different countries, to 
> attack problems that no one person, or nation, can solve alone.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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