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COLLABORATIONOLUTION

Collaborationolution: The Evolution of Collaboration
The history of civilization can be described as "more people pooling resources in new ways”. With the explosion of global exchange of information, the unfettered facts are overwhelming for any single person. Enter social collaboration.

The history of science shows a shift from single-investigator ‘little science’ to increasingly large, expensive, multinational, interdisciplinary and interdependent ‘big science’. In physics and allied fields this shift has been well documented, but the rise of collaboration in the life sciences and its effect on scientific work and knowledge has received little attention. Research in biology exhibits different historical trajectories and organisation of collaboration in field and laboratory – differences still visible in contemporary collaborations such as the Census of Marine Life and the Human Genome Project. We employ these case studies as strategic exemplars, supplemented with existing research on collaboration in biology, to expose the different motives, organisational forms and social dynamics underpinning contemporary large-scale collaborations in biology and their relations to historical patterns of collaboration in the life sciences. We find the interaction between research subject, research approach as well as research organisation influencing collaboration patterns and the work of scientists.

In science, a single lifetime is often enough to witness major transformations.1 Though the 20th century witnessed major developments in physics research, its second half was marked by transformations in molecular biology. Nobel Prize winners James Watson and John Sulston both witnessed, contributed to, and chronicled these changes.2 Watson's ‘Double Helix’ recounts the reconstruction of the structure of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) in 1953, as published in a seminal Nature paper. He developed the model of DNA, together with Francis Crick, within the Cavendish Laboratory in the traditional English university town Cambridge. They worked relatively independently and the number of other scientists that figure in ‘The Double Helix’ is limited.3 Watson describes the scientific quest of a small group of scientists pursuing research in a small-scale academic environment. Sulston's story relays a completely different world. Though Sultson's career began in the worm research community in much the same small-scale academic environment as Watson – the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge – his description of his later years deciphering the human genome illustrates a radically different world, involving the planning and adaptive management of a large, dynamic project with a clear mission, huge budget and expensive instruments involving hundreds of scientists in laboratories spanning the globe. Moreover, the exclusively academic environment is supplanted by an international and political setting, including academia, governments, funding bodies, business, media and the public.