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Gallo in the 1980s, 3 both of which had all the elements of a Hollywood drama. Examples
of collaboration in science include the decade-long effort that led to the mapping of the
human genome, arguably one of the largest international scientific collaborations ever
undertaken, 4 and the number of South–South and North–South collaborations undertaken
ever so often in high energy physics at international research facilities such as CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research. 5 If deciphering the human genome took
thousands of scientists and more than $3 billion, there are also examples at the other extreme
of single individuals like the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman,
who had turned down both the Fields Medal and the Clay Millennium Prize, 6 and India's
own Srinivasa Ramanujan, 7 both of whom worked virtually in isolation and at no cost to
the exchequer and yet produced world class research. Although such lone rangers are
rare, their work will also form part of the universal knowledge pool of science.
Scientists build on what is already known. Cooperative or competitive, lone rangers
or working as a team, scientists depend to a great extent on the contributions to knowledge
made by others across space and time — scientists working in any part of the world
and those who have contributed to science in the past. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “if I
have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Information is the key to science development. It helps scientists and scholars not
only advance knowledge but also their own professional status. In science, information is
a two-way street: scientists make the new information they generate available to as many
of their peers as possible, and seek and obtain as quickly as possible the information generated
by other researchers that is relevant to their own research.
Down the centuries, since scholarly communication is said to have begun in ancient
Greece more than 2,000 years ago, research has typically been communicated in parallel
by speech and writing. 8 However, since the beginning of modern research in Western
Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries flow of information is facilitated
largely by professional journals. In those early days science was known as natural philosophy!
Ever since the first professional journals — Journal des Sçavans in France and
the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England — commenced publica-
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Bazell R (2008), Dispute behind Nobel Prize for HIV research: French researchers win for virus discovery;
controversial scientist shunned. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27049812/ns/healthsecond_opinion.
Human Genome Project Information,
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml.
Kroes N (2010), CERN...fascinating insight into scientific collaboration.
http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/neelie-kroes/tag/cern-eu/.
Gessen M (2010), Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century , Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.
Kanigel R (1991), The Man who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, Scribner, New York.
Meadows A J (1997), Communicating Research, Academic Press, San Diego.
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