The Science of Big Science
Science is getting bigger. Just about every scientific discipline —astronomy, conservation, drug development, genetics, neuroscience,physics — is organizing massive collaborations of researchers in thename of reaching massive goals. These so-called Big Science efforts havebig budgets, big lists of participating institutions, big presscoverage, and big pronouncements. Big Science isn’t new (the term was around in 1961, if not before), but it does seem to be getting more popular.
Take a project that readers of this blog are probably familiar with: the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, which the world first heard aboutin February when President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Unionaddress. The projected budget of BRAIN is $3 billion over 10 years,which will be divvied out by three federal agencies and severalnonprofits. The project made headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post,and every other major news outlet. Its goal, according to Obama, was to“unlock the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between ourears.” Could there be a larger project?
And BRAIN is just one of an increasingly long list of expensive,collaborative science projects. The Big Question, of course, is whetherthe Go-Big strategy is more effective than the typical model of fundingindividual labs.
Two commentaries came out last week about collaborations inbiomedical sciences. One of them, about big-ticket neuroscience projectssuch as BRAIN, focused mostly on the expected payoffs of these efforts.The other, about medical research consortia, puts forth a more novelidea: that we need to treat the process of Big Science itself as ascience. Creating a monster consortium might be trendy, but it’s not theright strategy for every scientific goal. Researchers need to figureout when, exactly, the approach is likely to be effective — and whenit’s not.
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