A Boston Globe article today says that 11 MIT professors have written a letter to the MIT president accusing Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, head of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, of interfering with the recruitment of a young researcher to the faculty of the MIT biology department and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which shares the same building as the Picower. The researcher, Alla Karpova, declined MIT’s job offer. According to the article, Tonegawa and Karpova’s research areas overlap and some are saying that Tonegawa felt threatened by her and that she was advised to stay away from MIT because of Tonegawa’s opposition to her recruitment. He reportedly declined her request to collaborate with her. Some professors say that Tonegawa is overly competitive, according to the Globe.

Karpova also happens to be a woman, bringing another dimension to the story. Some are saying this could be a gender issue or it could be an example, albeit an extreme one, of the high level of competition that exists in biology today (or it could be both).

This harkens back to a conversation I had over lunch yesterday with Willy Lensch, one of our bloggers, and a biologist at Children’s. We talked about the hyper-competitiveness in biology that often results in scientists who work the same area not talking or collaborating with each other, when in an ideal world, to answer scientific questions, they are the ones who should be talking to each other.

Has biology gotten too competitive, to the point now where collaborations and sharing of knowledge that could be fruitful aren’t happening, or aren’t happening enough?

Of course one needs to advance one’s career, but scientists are scientists because they want to advance knowledge, right? So how can one balance the need to advance one’s career with the mission of a scientist: to advance knowledge?