When you think of a scientific discovery like the discovery of penicillin or of radiation, who do you think of making it? I want you to picture it in your mind for a moment. What do you see? Do you see a single person making that discovery? Or do you see a team of people? Grab a mug of tea and settle in because today we're going to be talking about scientific collaborations.

(Describer) Tea Break.

Oh, that's still very hot tea. When we think of science, I think a lot of us really think of scientific rock stars, these world-changing people who've made huge discoveries and singularly pushed science forwards. But today that's rarely true. Sure, there are stories like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin in a singular accidental finding. But we forget that that journey from moldy plate in the lab to usable antibiotic was not made by just one person. In fact, the Nobel Prize for penicillin was not awarded to Fleming alone but rather to Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain, who made the methods that allowed us to make large quantities of penicillin, allowing it to become a usable and useful antibiotic. Now I'm not here to say that there are no great scientists who do amazing work alone or to say that everybody in science is an awesome collaborator and all scientists are best friends. But I do think that there is a disconnect between the idea we often see portrayed in the media of science being a singular endeavor and the reality that a lot of science done today is done as a collaborative effort. Still hot. A 2003 study on scientific collaboration pointed out some really great reasons why science is becoming more collaborative, including the fact that science tackles really complex problems. And as knowledge and technology move forwards, individual scientists are becoming more and more specialized in their areas of expertise. So to tackle these large multipronged problems, we often need many scientists with many different skills and many different pieces of equipment from many different centers and groups to all come together to tackle these complex issues. I think one of the areas where we actually do see collaboration in science represented in sort of popular culture and the media is things like physics and astronomy, where very large consortia and groups from around the world come together to do really amazing work. In fact, aerospace research and space science are some of the first times that I can remember seeing collaborative science represented. So thinking about things like watching space shuttle launches and watching mission control as the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, you're really getting a representation that it wasn't just one person who sent a rocket up into space, but rather really large groups of people all coming together and celebrating when their research flies off into space. Seeing that is really, really cool, and it makes it really clear that that science is a collaboration between a big team. This is something that I think about a lot because I want to make videos and films that really represent the reality of science. So I do try and think about how we can represent that collaboration that does happen in places like biology that might not be quite as flashy but might be a field biologist collecting data perhaps as part of a team and then bringing it back to the lab where there are lots of people working together to analyze this data and go through it and, I don't know-- we need to find the rocket moment for biology, I think. And, personally, I haven't quite figured it out yet. But I'm working on it. I'm drinking some tea and I'm thinking about it. Now some people who've spent more time than I really delving into this idea of the "lone genius" in science have come to the conclusion that this type of representation of science and scientists can be a problem. This often comes up around the time that the Nobel Prize is awarded every year because the prize can only go to three individuals, but often in science many more people than that have worked on a discovery. A Guardian article from 2017 even noted that one of that year's winners in physics, Dr. Rainer Weiss, pointed out that the discovery of gravitational waves, for which that year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded, was actually the work of closer to about a thousand people across more than 40 years. Now, collaboration in science isn't always perfect. In fact, that 2003 study that I pointed out was in fact an in-depth case study of a lack of collaboration in a newly-formed research group. The collaboration in that group was really sparse and it was noticeably much less than surrounding research groups that had been formed at the same time. I like that one of the points that it makes is that science is still a human endeavor. You need things like trust and compatible personalities and work styles to make successful collaborations happen, and those types of things can take time to develop in newly-formed groups. One of the things that I found most interesting was that some of the study participants found collaboration to be a rite of passage in science. To be seen as a collaborator or to have collaborative opportunities arise, you had to be seen as knowledgeable in your field and a good scientist worth collaborating with. They saw that fourth- and fifth-year graduate students reported more connections to other projects than first- and second-year graduate students, which makes sense; as you develop your knowledge and skills as you become a scientist, you have more skills and resources that people want to share and collaborate with. But for me, these aren't just abstract examples. This is also the reality that I experienced in lab. I didn't do anything in isolation, and no one that I saw really did either. My PhD project was supported by so many people. There were collaborators in other labs who used their specialties and expertise to help me do experiments and collect data. There were older graduate students and postdocs who helped me analyze that data. There were technicians and lab managers who helped me to run experiments, helped to teach me new skills, and helped to keep the lab running. There were other lab members who helped with experiments and reagents and ideas. There was my PI who provided guidance and kept the lab running and helped to really drive my research forward. And because of this collaborative nature, I would say that for the majority of talks and papers and presentations in my field, scientists typically speak in the first-person plural. They say things like, "We did this experiment," and, "We found this," and, "We analyzed this" because, really, it feels almost rude to say, "I did this" and to sort of not acknowledge all of that other collaborative work that goes into these projects. It was actually really hard in things like my thesis defense or in talks where I had to really reflect on my own progress to say "I" because it does feel rude, as if you're denying that there was all of this additional help that really helped to support the work that you were doing. One research chapter of my PhD is already published and the second is in the submission process now. The first has six authors, and the second has twelve. And each of those people provided invaluable work to make that project happen, even though we sort of refer to that overarching project as mine. But I could not have done it without all of those people. And I'm not alone in this. I'm also second author on a paper that just came out that has 20 authors. At least in the life sciences, it's common to have big groups of people like this all working to push a project forward. A study from 2015 looked at authorship on scientific papers between 1900 and 2011 and saw that in the natural and medical sciences, single-author papers decreased from 87% of the papers in 1900 to only 7% of the papers in 2011. They also found that interinstitutional and international collaboration also rose in that time period and that more collaborative papers were more likely to be cited or referenced more often. They couldn't specifically define a cause for this relationship but they did point out again that pooling resources from multiple institutions and scientists and countries may provide the increased resources needed to solve increasingly complex problems. The Scientific American article that led me to that study actually made a good point about the fact that if students think that science is a really singular career-- that you have to do everything yourself-- it can be kind of isolating and intimidating. I think, you know, when I think of scientists on TV, I think of that one forensic scientist who's in the lab all the time and seems to be able to run every different possible experiment and they know everything about everything and, like, everything rests on that one person, and that's really intimidating to think that if I am going to be a scientist, I need to be the expert and I'm going to work alone and I'm not going to have any support. Like, that's kind of scary. Sure, there are a lot of times where you do work alone in the lab. I remember lots of late nights alone in the lab doing research, but I think that the most fun times that I had in science were when I was doing science with other people. And maybe that was sitting next to someone in the tissue-culture hood preparing cells together for an experiment, or maybe that was bouncing ideas around at a lab meeting. Honestly, the most fun that I had in science was together, not alone. But this idea of the lone genius doesn't just exist in the science world, and in fact my friend James over at Amor Sciendi has some ideas about how this concept applies to the art world as well. Hey, Alex, you know, I find that people think the same way about artists. We for some reason like to have this image of starving artists toiling away in her or his studio. We love the image of artistic knowledge created by a solitary innovative genius. If you want to explore this question in the arts, head over to my channel, Amor Sciendi, after watching this. Now, again, none of this is trying to say that individual scientists or artists can't make great discoveries or provide huge contributions to the field. That's not what I'm trying to say at all. But I do think that modern-day science really is often the result of collaborations and of teamwork. And, I don't know, I think a lot about the fact of how do we best portray that to people outside of the scientific world? I think people are often surprised when I talk to them about, like, the true teamwork of a lab and of collaborations and international collaborations and, I don't know, I think-- I think a lot about how do we better translate that out to other people? So, this is something that I've been thinking about as I drink my tea. But I want to hear from you as well on this. Are you a scientist? What has your experience with collaboration been? Maybe you do work singularly and alone, and I'd love to hear about those experiences. Or maybe you do work as parts of large teams to really push big things forward. So let me know what your experience has been down below. And if you're not a scientist, let me know-- when I asked you that question at the beginning, "Who makes scientific discoveries?", did you think of one person or did you think of a team? I really am curious of what perception is around this and how we can try and better reflect what reality is across different fields, which in some fields, you know, it is smaller groups or one person and in other fields, it's bigger. So, this is just my experience, but I want to hear about your thoughts too. A huge gigantic thank you hug to my Patreon patrons for supporting my content, and thank you to you for watching this video. Gigantic shout out to James from Amor Sciendi for really coming up with this topic of the idea of teamwork and collaboration in art and science. You have to go check out his video. It's a really great dive into the same thing in art, so card up there, link down below. And as always, remember to go forth and do science collaboratively.

(Describer) She nods.

Good tea. Mint tea.