Lots of things happened this past week. Most important of all, Dr. Adina Howe gave some absolutely wonderful presentations on microbiome. A great amount of interests were generated and many good questions were asked. Also from the Q&A sessions, I had a glimpse of the side of the acadamic world that I am not familiar with at all. It went around two themes:
- Is exploratory/discovery scientific research interesting/exciting?
- (or necessary?)
- Is collaboratory work a waste time?
- (is all about competition right?)
Obviously, I am biased.
For one, majority of my research experience inovles exploratory work and I definitley value exploratory/discovery scientific research. For two, I came from a multidisciplinary background (microbiology, microbial ecology, engineering, and self-trained bioinformatics). It is kind of hard not to collaborate.
Besides the self-interests, I think exploratory/discovery research is an important step in pushing science forward and could be (or is) very exciting. I like to think of exploratory work as finding the stepping rocks to go across river in the fog. Taking the research on microbiome as an example, gut ecosystem is like the river. Understanding the relationship between gut microbiota and intestinal diseases is the process of crossing the river in the fog. Each stepping stone is an analogy to an individual step of discovery (e.g., microbial communty structures). Some of these discoveries might seem to be boring (e.g., healthy individual A’s gut microbiota is different from healthy individual B) and some of them might not be correct. But without exploring the field and asking the simple questions like “who is there? Is A different from B? etc.,” we would be stuck on the unknown side forever.
I think rejecting the idea of collaborativity in the modern day research is like rejecting global interactions by having a closed economy. We all know how well that one went. Collaboration is not a competition, intead, it’s a communication, it’s the attitute of “let’s help each other in this fast evolving world/field.” With the fast advancing in technologies and growing in information accumulation, it’s impossible for one person to do it all and understand it all. Most importantly, one doesn’t need to know it all and do it all because the “pie” is becoming big enough for sharing. This is particularly true since the commercialization of next-generation sequencing technologies. The amount of sequencing information a metagenomic experiment generates nowadays is labor intensive to analyze and could be analyzed from several different approaches. Why let the information go to wastes when collaborativity would increase the productivity and yield valuable scientifica results?
Just some personal opinions and values.