Once while I was working on an article, a respected and normally decorous scientist wrote me this advice: "For God's sake, do not interview or even mention (my colleague), a fool with a fool's conclusion who is untrustworthy as a scientist and as a moral being."
What is notable here, aside from the complete mastery of sentence rhythm, is the all-out competitiveness. Competitiveness, in our individualistic dog-eat-dog society, isn't surprising.
But that same scientist, on making a discovery, will make every detail of that discovery immediately public. And the untrustworthy, immoral colleague, of course, will use the published discovery to form another fool's conclusion. This balance of cooperation and competition is how science works. It's also how every other human interaction, from marriage to manufacturing cars, works. What surprises us dogged individualists, however, is that the balance in science is so heavily weighted toward cooperation.
This is the way scientists work. When they discover something, they tell everybody everything: what assumptions they made, what measurements, by what methods. They show their data, the statistics by which they make sense of their data, the possible ways their data could be wrong. They publish it where all the other scientists can read it, both in scientific journals and in amazing virtual libraries, like the one run by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (it's public: www.lanl.gov).
Then all those other scientists will now publicly make hash out of the discovery: The assumptions were too loose, the measurements sloppy, the methods inadequate, the statistics just plain wrong. Then this second bunch of scientists will tear off and repeat the discovery, only done right this time, and with the larger implications that the first bunch was too blind to see. All this, the second bunch publishes; then the original scientists take the second bunch apart, and so on, far into the night.
As a way of working, it's nit-picky and nerve-wracking. It's also what Isaac Newton was talking about when he wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
I wouldn't want to undersell the competitiveness in this. In fact, Newton wrote that now-famous sentence in a letter to another scientist, Robert Hooke, pursuing an argument about what might cause the colors in thin plates of glass and who suggested what first. Scientists now and forevermore love being first. The same scientist who can't find his socks can remember that 25 years ago he suggested using that filter to find those galaxies, long before this young hotshot used it, found the galaxies, and became famous.
Maybe scientists are individualistic dogs after all. A German-built satellite that detects X-rays from stars and galaxies surveyed the entire sky, and astronomers would love to compare the sky in X-rays to the sky we see, but the Germans keep the survey for themselves.
Such competitiveness is exceeded only by scientists' impulse toward cooperation. The impulse is so strong that in early 1939, when physicists discovered atomic fission, they knew immediately it implied the atomic bomb, but didn't stop publishing fission research internationally, mind you until mid-1940. Standard scientific practice is immediate publication of the discovery, data and all. It's as though the software designer of Quicken published the code first in a computer magazine, as though designer Giorgio Armani sent his winter-collection sketches to clothing manufacturers.
Even in scientific fields where small teams spend decades building expensive equipment to collect large amounts of data, the scientists who invest so much get the first returns but then release the data. Biologists who map the structure of proteins publish their conclusions, withhold the data for a year, then publish that, too. Newly planned all-sky surveys in infrared and visible light will be made public a year later.
And the scientists don't like even a year's delay. Other sky surveys are public immediately (see http://sundog.stsci.edu and http://www.pst.stsci.edu/gsss/gsss.html). So is the human genome (see http://hugo.gdb.org/hugo.html or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). This July, the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Science and Nature, changed the year's-delay policy for manuscripts of structural biologists: no publication without a deposit receipt from the Protein Data Bank. Science advocates the policy for everybody from local tenure committees to international funders. Anything less, says Nature's editorial, is "offensive to the broader community."
It's a strange combination: a human endeavor driven by competition but operating on cooperation. It's nevertheless extraordinarily effective; it's the way science marches on, and in its march science has changed the world time and time again.
Here's a theory: Maybe when you want to sell cars, clothes or software, competition works. But if you want to make the most effective, efficient, elegant car possible to see what it would look like, or to present it to God or all humanity then you're better off working the way you'd work to find the fate of the universe, or to cure cancer: That is, stand on the giants' shoulders, then let some giants stand on yours.
Ann Finkbeiner writes frequently for Science and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
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