Science: A melting pot of intellect
By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.
Nothing happens in a vacuum.
Science is a meeting of like minds attacking that same problem. This melting pot of intellect can cross departmental lines within in an institution or it can cross institutional lines, drawing in individuals from other colleges and universities. It can cross state and national borders, with collaborators coming from around the world. It crosses generational lines as one generation of scientists work with another, often the older serving as mentor to the younger.
If you look at the authors of many scientific and medical papers, you will see what I mean. The authors come from around the world. It is amazing that they can collaborate across such great distances. Of course, current communications technology makes it easier. E-mail, web-based information exchange and even fax certainly trump the mail service that used to serve as the medium of exchange.
These fast communications made it possible to sequence the human genome – and subsequent genomes – in record time. Around the world, sequencing centers exchanged information and technology and built that base of information with a dispatch that was unthinkable even five years previously.
The Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center was one of the major players in this effort. If you go to the Center's web site today, you can follow their progress on the many genomes that remain to be sequenced. Go to the home page for the Human Genome Project to view the around-the-world collaboration that made this possible.
Yet international collaboration abounds in other arenas. Scientists share not only information, but material from their experiments. These kinds of arrangements have made the progress in biomedical science possible and speeded up progress everywhere.
It is important that such exchange of ideas, information and material continue if scientists are to continue to learn about cells, tissues and the human condition and to improve it. In a world where too many people try to keep too many secrets, it is important to remember that the exchange of ideas is the fodder on which progress is built.
