Posts tagged with collaboration.
Feeling the elephant, or how scientists collaborate
The comments posted after a few of my recent entries have revealed a Grand Canyon-esque divide between two opposing factions of researchers. There are those who believe that in order to be successful in the field, one must live in the lab - carrying out experiments well into the night and the next morning and only pausing to briefly bivouac in a warm spot next to the autoclave, nestled atop a pile of lab coats.
On the other side, we have those who insist that the best researchers are the ones that make time for other activities, be they long walks on the beach, a good finger-painting session, or sculpting great scenes from the history of science in butter.
I, of course, fall squarely into the latter camp, as do my labmates. While our butter-sculpting skills might not be up to par with others' (I still have trouble getting the feet right), my co-workers and I are not just scientists - we are mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, athletes, photographers, ballroom dance champions, entrepreneurs, coaches, volunteers, and culinary genii, just to name a few.
I don't want to devote this column to a debate on which of these camps is better, lest it disintegrate into spiteful bickering. Someone will call out one camp for sacrificing baths in the name of research; someone else will kick over someone's butter sculpture. Instead, I'd like to reveal one of the secrets behind how those of us in Camp Good Times manage to balance outstanding science with having a life.
Collaboration.
A scientific collaboration occurs when two or more independent researchers - sometimes across campus from each other, sometimes across the globe - decide to join forces to tackle some heady research problem. It may be that one research group has a novel method they've developed but no dataset to try it on, while another group has a dataset that needs to be analyzed but hasn't got the method (or, in many cases, doesn't even know of the method's existence). The comp sci department on campus is a particularly fruitful place to go searching for these types of collaborations - they have algorithms and techniques to tackle all sorts of problems from every discipline on campus, and are verily salivating at the prospect of real-world data to try them out on. Walk into the CS building holding a sign that says "I have data" and you run the risk of being trampled by a herd of researchers eager to work with you. The bruises and footprints on your face, however, are entirely worth it, because the insights that come out of this cross-disciplinary tag-teaming are completely novel.
In other cases, a group of related labs studying a similar topic using slightly different methods decide to pool their knowledge for the betterment of all. This is akin to the old story of the blind men who each felt a part of an elephant and was asked to guess what it was.
Somebody feels the trunk and guesses it's a snake, someone else feels the leg and insists it's a tree, while another man, who clearly needs to brush up on his biology, mistakes the elephant's side for a wall. In most versions of this tale, the conflict is never resolved and everybody is too buy bickering to realize that there is an elephant standing inches away from them, an elephant which is probably quite mad after all that poking, prodding and being called a wall. A few versions, however, go a little further and see the conflict degrade into a full-on bar brawl, which may or may not include the angry elephant.
As the wise man in the tale explains, it is only when knowledge is shared that the complete picture emerges. This holds true for elephants, and it holds true for science. Our lab, for instance, studies a new class of therapeutics for the treatment of infectious diseases. There is simply no way we could test it on all of the major bugs in the world, and even if we could, would you really want to work in a lab that housed everything from Anthrax to Yellow Fever?* Instead, we focus on a couple of models that we're experts at, and have our collaborators test the compounds in the other models that they specialize in. Everybody wins, especially those of us who get to visit our far-off collaborators every so often to compare notes in person.
Ask any respected researcher their secret, and I can guarantee that many - almost all, perhaps - will answer that it's to surround themselves with good people, both in terms of who they bring into the lab, and who they choose to collaborate with. Those researchers who fail to foster at least a few collaborations are sentencing themselves to massive workloads, depriving themselves of important insights, and making it very difficult to get a complete picture of their subject. That, and they're probably making a lot of elephants really mad. So unless you want a rampaging elephant trampling your lab members and stamping on your glassware, get out there and find a few willing folk to partner up with.
*There don't seem to be any infectious diseases that start with Z. I'm hoping to discover one someday, so that I can eventually go back and improve this sentence.
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JENNIFER GARDY 
