Recent calls from MIT and Harvard for greater collaboration raise questions about how to balance collaboration with competition.

Constanza Villalba

At MIT, a controversy erupted last week over allegations in the Boston Globe that the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate, recently deterred an up-and-coming neuroscientist, Alla Karpova, from accepting a faculty appointment with MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research because their areas of research overlap too much. Karpova eventually turned down MIT’s offer. The latest installment of this story, in today’s Globe, features a transcript of some of the e-mails between the two scientists.

In response to the controversy, MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield, formed a committee to find ways for the neuroscience bodies at MIT to work better together. Meanwhile, earlier this month, a report released by a Harvard faculty panel said that the university’s organizational structure and culture are obstacles to collaboration among Harvard scientists.

Science has always been competitive, and necessarily so. But now, MIT and Harvard have realized that it can, in some cases, get too competitive and that greater collaboration is needed on their campuses. Though talk about the benefits of collaboration is commonplace among scientists, and some studies (for example, Lee and Bozeman, 2005, Figg et al., 2006) have shown its benefits, scientists are not always the most cooperative bunch.

Nature Network Boston interviewed a few local and Massachusetts-based scientists and science historians, as well as an anthropologist who specializes in the culture of science, to get their perspective on the climate of competition in science.

Is there more competition among scientists than there used to be and, if so, what’s driving that competition? Can we blame commercial interests?

Jonathan King, biology professor, MIT: Absolutely. The possibility of commercial reward feeds the fire of competition. In neuroscience, which is already one of the most profitable sectors, your clientele is potentially enormous, because you might be targeting a healthy population. It’s no longer about making sick people well. It’s about marketing the prospect of enhancing cognitive function.

Chris Stubbs, physics and astronomy professor, Harvard University: I think that the press often plays an unhelpful role. My impression is that there is a sense in the general public that science is done by a towering intellect who is standing at the bench, but the overwhelming majority of science is done in teams. When the press covers science, they tend to focus on single scientists, and that causes something I call the “Nobel prize syndrome”—the epitome of this notion of individual achievement. I think individual contributions should be rewarded but not to the point of providing a distorted view.

Paul Rabinow, anthropology professor, University of California, Berkeley: For the last 20 years, critics have said money has been destroying science, but that assumes that science used to be somehow pure. The image of pure scientists before venture capital is not true. Sir Isaac Newton was chancellor of the [British] mint.

Some scientific disciplines seem to be more collaborative than others. Physicists, for example, are reputed to be more cooperative than biologists, and industry scientists seem to be more attuned to teamwork. Are there lessons to be learned from physics and industry?

Rabinow: Particle physicists have no choice in the matter. They have to do group projects to get access to accelerators. And in industry, it’s not that you have nicer people; it’s that people are organized first around projects and the point is profit, not fame.

King: There are certainly fields that have a conscious culture of collaboration, and others that don’t. I was originally trained in bacteriophage biology. The founders of the field had a very highly developed conception of science as cooperative, and they inculcated it into the field. To this day, that culture persists as their legacy.

What can universities do, at the institutional level, to improve collaboration among scientists?

King: One thing universities can do is level the playing field for faculty members, so that they all share a common goal and have similar teaching and administrative demands. At MIT, faculty members housed within privately funded institutes seem to be held to a different standard than those belonging to the rest of the university. When universities accept private donations, they should insist on administering those funds with autonomy and not allow funding sources to balkanize the university.

Donald de B. Beaver, history of science professor, Williams College: There’s very little universities can do at the institutional level, but they can favor collaborations with in-house grants and otherwise reward those who collaborate. Governments sometimes encourage international collaborations through funding. China, for example, rewards researchers who can get international collaborations.

Stubbs: I’m not sure I can speak to what should be done on an institutional level, but I think the system thrives in an environment where there is healthy competition. By healthy I mean an environment in which people treat each other with mutual respect and integrity and with honor. To ensure healthy competition, there’s an education component—the department of astronomy has conversations with graduate students about the ethics of science; and there’s a training component—senior scientists have to lead by example, to act as good role models.