Collaboration in the New Life Sciences

John N. Parker, Niki Vermeulen, Bart Penders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754678700
• eBook ISBN: 9781317164463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years the organisation and practice of collaboration in the life sciences has undergone radical transformations, owing to the advent of big science enterprises, newly developed data gathering and storage technologies, increasing levels of interdisciplinarity, and changing societal expectations for science. Collaboration in the New Life Sciences examines the causes and consequences of changing patterns of scientific collaboration in the life sciences. This book presents an understanding of how and why collaboration in the life sciences is changing and the effects of these changes on scientific knowledge, the work lives and experiences of scientists, social policy and society. Through a series of thematically arranged chapters, it considers the social, technical, and organizational facets of collaboration, addressing not only the rise of new forms of collaboration in the life sciences, but also examining recent developments in two broad research areas: ecology and environment, and the molecular life sciences. With an international team of experts presenting case studies and analyses drawn from the US, UK, Asia and Europe, Collaboration in the New Life Sciences will appeal not only to scholars and students of science and technology studies, but also to those interested in science and social policy, and the sociology of work and organisations.

PART I
Collaboration Arises

Chapter 1
Collecting Collaborations: Understanding Life Together

Niki Vermeulen and Bart Penders

Collective inquiries into life

In 2001, the first draft of the human genome sequence was published in Nature and Science (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium 2001, Venter et al. 2001). An accompanying news item states that ‘the draft human genome sequence published in Nature this week is the culmination of 15 years of work, involving 20 sequencing centres in six countries’ (Nature 2001). The paper itself lists the ‘International Human Genome Consortium’ as the author, an institutional alias representing hundreds of individual scientists. Deciphering the human genome has been a collaborative effort between international networks of scientists. As such, it is representative for a trend in scientific circles: rising numbers of authors on research publications are the result of a rising number of collaborations between scientists. This comes together with the development of organisations to maintain and manage the teams of scientists and the need for substantial financial resources. Science has become both big and collaborative, and more recently, this has also become especially visible in the life sciences (Vermeulen 2009).

The HGP provides us with all the ingredients to use it as a paradigmatic example of ‘big biology’. This novel organisational form brings together scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds working on a common goal on an international scale. In addition, the HGP shows how the networking of biological research comes together with the development of instrumentation and new ways of collecting, storing and analysing data. The considerable investment of public money is legitimised by huge expectations generated during the building of the project (van Lente 1993, 2000, Douglas 2005). It had often been promised that the map of the human genome would bring the cure for many serious illnesses, although with hindsight we can say that it has been only a first step in the understanding of the complexity of human life.

The studies that are collected in this volume can be located at the intersection between scientific developments in biology, the organisation of science and the relation between science and society. Knowledge produced in the contexts of these collaborations has the potential to transform nature and society in fundamental ways. However, there is little known about the processes by which collaborations are producing knowledge. This volume therefore asks how and why collaboration in the life sciences is changing. In addition, it investigates the effects of these transformations on the character of scientific knowledge as well as on the work lives and experiences of scientists. And, if so many people are working on a problem, using so many resources and promising abundant benefits as the results of their inquiries, the work they do has an impact on policy and the whole of society. Given that the ways in which science is done and the ways in which it is organised are intimately intertwined with the results it produces, mass inquiry into life is worth studying, as well as its role in our global society.

Consider for instance the field of nutrition research, which promises to change what people will be eating in the future. Over the last decade, the rapid ‘genomicisation’ of the life sciences has also found fertile ground in nutrition science, resulting is the novel approach of nutrigenomics. The latter is the study of the interaction of nutrition and nutritients with the molecular building blocks of life. As a result across the globe, multiple multimillion pound/euro/dollar consortia have been set up in which hundreds of scientists work. Nutrigenomics boasts its potential to contribute to public health and individual health through e.g., tailoring nutrition to group characteristics. However, when studying this collaborative field it becomes apparent that while immense amounts of knowledge about the interaction between nutrients and genes, proteins and metabolites were formed, the articulated goal of public health has not come any closer yet (Penders 2008, Penders et al. 2009a, 2009b).

Existing studies into scientific enquiry teach us that a certain misfit between the promises of science and its lab-floor practices serves a very specific purpose: a mobilisation of the future in the present is required to secure resources and to align political and research priorities (Brown et al. 2000, Penders 2008, Vermeulen 2009). Science costs (public) money, and society is often only willing to pay for scientific inquiry with the potential to improve society in general and public health in particular.

Yet, why and how are large-scale consortia formed? And how do they produce socially robust knowledge? These straightforward questions do not have simple answers. As only a few studies have empirically mapped the organisation of large collaborations in the life sciences, the complex relations between science, its changing organisation and its results are not yet fully understood.

A large body of research in science studies has demonstrated the centrality of research systems and technologies for the social organisation of collaborations and the knowledge which they produce (e.g., Melin and Persson 1996, Georghiou 1998). Indeed, many of the developments currently underway in the life sciences stem from new developments in these areas. This book discusses these trends and it will become evident that effectively supporting and encouraging new forms of collaboration in the life sciences requires new and innovative ways of thinking about the development and implementation of science and technology policy.

As a result, the study of scientific collaboration in the life sciences will provide new perspectives on scientific collaboration in general.

The social study of collaboration

This volume is a collection of studies into collaboration in the life science that aims to analyse how collaboration in the life sciences is changing, diagnose the reasons for these changes and outline some of its consequences. Phrased differently, the volume is about the study of how people study biological problems together, be it in large consortia or in other organisational structures. As this volume will show, there are many strategies for studying problems together, and many forms of ‘togetherness’. Before introducing the contributions collected in this volume, let us first reflect upon collaboration in biology and the study of it.

The absence of a concise and coherent narrative on what collaboration and cooperation in the life sciences means can be attributed to at least two key features of studies into scientific collaboration. First, the budding field of collaboration studies is still in the process of reaching a working agreement on these notions. Second, preexisting research on scientific collaboration has mostly been performed in other sciences than biology, mostly in astronomy and physics. So, what is collaboration and cooperation to the life sciences? Although existing definitions differ, they display a family resemblance: common characteristics, but no common definition.

In recent literature on scientific collaboration various definitions and approaches to its study can be recognised (Katz and Martin 1997, Chompalov and Shrum 1999, Chompalov et al. 2002, Wagner 2004, Hackett 2005, Shrum et al. 2007). Building on de Solla Price’s perspective on big science (1965), studies of collaboration often use quantitative analysis, for instance, by looking at the number of authors of a publication as sign of collaboration. These quantitative studies indicate an increase of collaboration, but leave reasons for increase and the precise character of the collaborations unstudied. The more fundamental questions of ‘what is collaboration?’ and ‘why collaborate?’ are more difficult to answer: ‘These deceptively simple questions have elicited and qualified answers’ (Hackett 2005: 668).

The notion of ‘co-labouring’ can be seen as the literal roots of collaboration (Maienschein 1993). Apparently narrow views on collaboration as ‘the work of teams of scientists with shared goals, such as formulating or testing particular empirical hypotheses, and with shared products, such as co-authored papers’ (Griesemer and Gerson 1993: 185) exist next to broader ones such as ‘an institution for conducting “big” science - work that involves coordinating many people and substantial resources for long periods of time’ (202). Within such a broader definition, Maienschein distinguishes different types of collaborators, consisting of primary collaborators - who share full responsibility for the project and its goals - and secondary collaborators who are less involved, like technicians or (data) collectors that only share responsibility for parts of the project (Maienschein 1993).

Katz and Martin (1997) suggest a division between strong and weak collaboration. They distinguish different levels of collaboration from individuals to nations and collaboration can occur either between or within these different levels, using, respectively, the prefixes inter and intra: ‘Thus international collaboration means collaboration between nations, while intranational collaboration means collaboration within a single nation’ (Katz and Martin 1997: 10). They also pay attention to the boundary of collaboration, which they find highly dependent on social conventions and often ‘very “fuzzy” or ill-defined’ (8) and open to negotiation. Additionally, Shrum and colleagues (2007) distinguish four different types of collaboration: bureaucratic collaboration, leaderless collaboration, non-specialised collaboration and participatory collaboration. Interestingly, they conclude that these organisational structures of collaboration are not specifically attached to certain types of science as they can be found throughout the spectrum of scientific disciplines studied. However, none of the studies mentioned above consider collaboration in the life sciences.

This volume will take the broad definition of collaboration of sociologist of science Hackett as a common starting point for exploring collaboration in the life sciences in more detail: ‘collaboration is a family of purposeful working relationship between two or more people, groups, or organisations. Collaborations form to share expertise, credibility, material and technical resources, symbolic and social capital’ (Hackett 2005: 671).

Next to defining scientific collaboration and its structure, the identification of factors that encourage the formation of research collaborations is equally important (Griesemer and Gerson 1993, Hackett 2005, Shrum et al. 2007). Reasons for collaboration vary. Escalating costs of the development of large instruments are often put forward as a reason to collaborate. However, specialisation and multi-disciplinary research can also be incentives to collaborate, as well as decreasing costs of travel, communication and increased credibility of research. Additionally, collaboration can be stimulated by funding organisations or it can have political motivations. In many instances the reasons for collaborating are hardly straightforward, and they are difficult to pin down.

The fact that there are several answers to the question ‘what is collaboration?’, implies that any ‘neutral’ and ‘empirical’ description of its evolution will inevitably become entangled with the more normative or programmatic question of what collaborations could or should be. Aforementioned studies of scientific collaboration primarily address collaboration in classic ‘big science’ fields, but they can also be read as initial attempts to give an overview of the phenomenon of scientific collaboration and create some order to build theory.

Although the studies are not univocal, some important similarities in their results can be noticed. First of all, they identify increasing collaboration in science together with increasing reflection on the subject of which they are symptomatic themselves as well. They acknowledge the complexity of the phenomenon of collaboration, note the relative lack of qualitative studies and put forward different approaches to study collaboration from a qualitative perspective (Katz and Martin 1997, Hackett 2005, Shrum et al. 2007). These approaches attend to similar features like the magnitude or extent of collaborations, reasons for collaboration (formation or purpose), the role of technologies, organisational aspects and typologies and the internal working of collaborations. Finally - and in light of the contemporary increase of collaboration - the various studies of collaboration point towards the importance of a critical approach towards scientific collaboration. While collaboration is sometimes seen as valuable in its own right, recent studies show that it also comes at a price (e.g., Penders et al. 2009a, Vermeulen 2009).

A brief history of collaboration

While we started this chapter with reference to the human genome project, this was not meant to suggest that collaboration is a purely contemporary trend. Although collaborative approaches to knowledge production are becoming more and more commonplace (Wuchty et al. 2007), their roots can be traced back centuries. Scientific collaboration in biology is not new.

Natural philosophers were part of the first forms of scientific collaboration in the life sciences that have been described as the grand alliance between science and exploration in the eighteenth century (Capshew and Rader 1992, Magner 1994, Fernández-Armesto 2006). Explorations of the world not only propelled the mapping of the earth and sky, but also widened knowledge of ‘the living world’. Historically, the most important reason for cooperation in biology is the dispersed character of biological material (Maienschein 1993). Biologists joined expeditions into the unknown to collect new species to describe or bring back home. They accumulated facts about plants, animals and people from all over the world, which not only helped to further develop classification schemes but also caused organisational changes in the acquisition of biological material. Infrastructural developments to transport people, samples and information were crucial for this early form of collaborative biology.

These early scientific expeditions gradually evolved into more coordinated multi-disciplinary research programmes that initially took the form of thematic years or decades, starting with the International Polar Year (IPY). Taking place in 1882–1883 and in 1932–1933, the first and second Polar Years concentrated international research efforts to investigate the North and South Pole. Afterwards, the polar years became a model for collaboration: ‘The experience gained by scientists and governments in international cooperation set the stage for other international scientific collaboration’ (International Polar Year 2005). More concretely, the success of the polar years led to the organisation of the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), which in turn functioned as a model for the International Biological Programme (1968–1974) organised by, amongst others, the International Union of Biological Sciences (Kwa 1987). This programme investigated ‘The Biological Basis of Productivity and Human Welfare’ and can be seen as one of the first attempts at ‘big ecology’. Since then, it has been analysed as such (Bocking 1997, Schloegel and Rader 2005, Parker 2006). In line with these thematic collaborations, the promotion of multi-disciplinary research in research programmes became a common addition to individual scholarships used by national and international funding agencies to distribute research money.

Nevertheless, biology is still commonly pictured as a small-scale laboratory science. This can be explained by the dominant image of biology as a lab-bench science. According to historian of science Pickstone (2000), the natural history model of the Renaissance that was characterised by trading nations, empire building, cabinets of curiosity and the establishment of scientific societies and national museums gave way to the ‘Age of Analysis’ that started to take things apart. This analytical shift took place in the nineteenth century in interaction with the emergence of a mechanical view, processes of rationalisation, the formation of disciplines, the development of research instruments and most importantly, the establishment of laboratories. It was followed by ‘experimentalism’, in which invention became central as means to control nature and create novelty.

It is in this context of analysis and experimentalism that we can recognise the emergence of the individual mode of work in biology, e.g., described by Knorr-Cetina (1999). While comparing high-energy physics to molecular biology, she even states that biology is a non-collaborative science. She presents molecular biology as an ‘individual, bodily lab-bench science’ with an individual ontology, in opposition to the large transnational collaborations of high energy physics that she characterises as superorganisms: ‘collectives of physicists, matched with collectives of instruments, that come as near as one can get to a post-romantic communitarian regime’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999: 4). Nevertheless, she also notices an increased need for collaboration in biology, as knowledge and instruments become more complex and the field more competitive.

Increasing collaboration in biology is more widely recognised and pictured as a development that took place in interaction with investigations into molecular biology, a new field that got shape in the late 1950s and 1960s (Mullins 1972, Magner 1994, de Charevian 2002, Strasser 2003b, 2003a). Inspired by Norman Anderson, a ‘biologist-engineer’ who proposed the Molecular Anatomy programme to catalogue and characterise all the human proteins, Weinberg (Weinberg 1961, 1967, 1999) predicts biology becom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by Edward J. Hackett
• Acknowledgements
• PART I COLLABORATION ARISES
• PART II COLLABORATION IN ECOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
• PART III COLLABORATION IN THE MOLECULAR LIFE SCIENCES
• PART IV COLLABORATION IN THE NEW LIFE SCIENCES REVISITED
• Index