A Globe story today says MIT president Susan Hockfield is calling on faculty to collaborate more. This follows on the controversy erupting at MIT now, with allegations of a senior MIT neuroscientist, Susumu Tonegawa, scaring away a young neuroscientist that MIT was trying to recruit because he didn’t want to work with her and may have even felt threatened by her. According to the Globe, Tonegawa said in a statement that he didn’t interfere with the recruitment of Alla Karpova, but that he did decline her request to be her mentor and collaborator.

It’s reminiscent of schoolyard politics, with researchers being told to stop fighting and to play together nicely.

MIT is trying to deal with the problem in a very university sort of way: setting up a committee.

But it will be a big challenge for this committee to chip away at what appears to me to be a very big problem extending well beyond MIT: changing the highly competitive culture of academic biology research.

It won’t be easy getting biologists to collaborate when faculty appointments, university and funding structures, incentives for career advancement and really the whole culture of academic science are still largely biased towards single-PI work and projects. The rapid growth of NIH funding in the 90s didn’t help either, bringing a lot of new people into the field, resulting in an even larger pool of people competing for now-dwindling NIH funds.

This must be quite discouraging for young biologists, who may still foster the ideals of scientific collaboration and sharing but are now having to face the realities of this high level of competition. One must choose one’s mentors and collaborators carefully, it seems, as I’m sure Karpova and many other young researchers are learning.

Let’s hope that as more new young people who want to share and collaborate enter the field and have more collaborative places to work—like the Broad Institute, or HHMI’s Janelia Farm (which incidentally, was where Karpova ultimately accepted a job offer), or potentially Harvard’s planned Allston campus—that slowly but surely the culture might change and that young researchers looking for mentors and collaborators won’t always get shut down.