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From: "carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sat, 24 Dec 1994 12:12:52 CST
Excerpt from: Advice to a Young Scientist, P.B. Medawar h&r c.1979
author preface includes; young equals old, him equals her.
CH.6 ~Aspects~of~Scientific~Life~and~Manners
~Collaboration
"As nearly all my scientific work has been done in collaboration
with others, I regard myself an authority on the subject.
Scientific collaboration is not at all like cooks elbowing each
other from the pot of broth; nor is it like artists working on
the same canvas, or engineers working out how to start a tunnel
simultaneously from both sides of a mountain in such a way that
the contractors do not miss each other in the middle and emerge
independently at opposite ends.
It is, in the planning stage, anyway, more like a session of gag
writers, for although each one knows, as all scientists know, that
having an idea -- a brainwave -- can be only a personal event,
each member knows that an atmosphere can be created in which one
member of the team sparks off the others so that they all build
upon and develop each other's ideas.
In the outcome, nobody is
quite sure who thought of what. The main thing is that something
was thought of. A young scientist who feels a strong compulsion
to say "That was my idea, you know," or "Now that you have
all come round to my way of thinking..." is not cut out for
collaborative work, and he and his colleagues would do better
if he worked on his own.
Old hands will always congratulate a
beginner on a bright idea that was genuinely the beginner's and
not a product of the synergism of minds that such a session
promotes.
~Synergism is the key word in collaboration --
it connotes that the joint effort is greater than the sum of
several contributions to it -- but collaboration is not obligatory,
no matter how many pompous pronouncements may be made on the
supersession of the individuals by the team. Collaboration is
a joy when it works, but many scientists can and many do get on
very well as loners.
A few Polonian precepts can do something to indicate whether or
not a scientist is cut out for collaboration. Unless he likes
his colleagues and admires them for their special gifts, he should
shun it; collaboration requires some generosity of spirit, and a
young scientist who can recognize in himself an envious temperament
and is jealous of his mates should on no account try to work with
others." 33-34
~Technicians~as~Colleagues.
"..technicians are colleagues in a collaborative research; they
must be kept fully in the picture about what an experiment is
intended to evaluate and about the way in which the procedures
decided upon by mutual consultation might "conduce to the sum
of business" (Bacon). 36
~Moral~and~Contractual~Obligations
"A scientist will normally have contractual obligations to his
employer and has always a special and unconditionally binding
obligation to the truth. 36
Contractual obligations on the one hand, and the desire to do
what is right on the other hand, can pose genuinely distress-
ing problems that many scientists have to grapple with. The
time to grapple is ~before a moral dilemma arises.
If a scientist has reason to believe that a research enterprise
cannot but promote the discovery of a nastier or more expeditious
quietus for mankind, then he must not enter upon it -- unless
he is in favor of such a course of action.
It is hardly possible that a scientist should recognize his
abbhorrence of such an ambition the first time he stirs the
caldron. If he ~does enter upon morally questionable research
and then publically deplores it, his beating of the breast will
have a hollow and unconvincing sound." 37