in praise of research collaboration

Ricky argues against research collaboration. Well, he doesn't exactly say that but read it for yourselves.

My counter-argument to his claim that it is mostly individuals who make the breakthroughs is that we tend to remember and idolise those individuals (the cult of the celebrity, as today's headlines on Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate), whereas it is not practical to enumerate the vast armies of people who collaborated on other advances. Who invented the CD-ROM or space shuttle or GPS or ...? Was there an individual? Was there a collaboration? What about the computer? Turing? Babbage? That's a heck of a long way from the laptop on your desk today.

Ricky mentions DNA. Sure, people think of Crick and Watson as the individuals who cracked DNA. Yet there were many other people in that story, including the controversy over their use of Rosalind Franklin's data. Even the wikipedia story mentions many other people who contributed. Now Ricky will argue that the informal collaborations of academics produced the desired results. Yes, but would not a formal collaboration of the correct range of skills in the one lab with a common goal have found it sooner?

The danger of the sole academic left to their own devices is the "angels on the head of a pin" phenomenom where they refine their expertise in a matter of no practical use to anyone. In the case of IT research in which we tend to build things, there is infinite scope to build infinitely many things of no interest to anyone but their builder. I am no fan of the sole academic. I'd rather see teams harnessed towards a specific useful purpose, but with a bit of slack for skunk works for those occasional flashes of individual brilliance.

And finally playing the man not the ball, where has Ricky received his research funding from lately? Being a sole academic or being part of a research team? As Hilaire Belloc says in his poem about Jim who ran away from a nurse and was eaten by a lion, "always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse!"