Best Examples of Scientific Collaborations

December 28, 2020 12:04 AM

I'm working on a project for which I would like to highlight some famous scientific collaboration stories, and I'm realizing that many common popularly-known scientific discovery stories have a tendency to celebrate a single genius, e.g. Newton developed his physics while quarantining during the Great Plague. What are some accessible stories that highlight the opposite - multiple people working together made an important scientific discovery?

I'm hoping to find stories about science or technology that will be familiar to the average person, or that could be explained in a sentence or two to the average person.

I'm also hoping to find *stories*. I know that CERN, for instance, is a massive collaboration that has done some remarkable things, but it doesn't make a compelling story to list the technical accomplishments of large organizations. Ideally the story has humans at the center.

posted by spenser to Science & Nature (24 answers total)

An obvious and timely example would be the husband and wife team who created the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine.

Famously, Watson and Crick shared the Nobel prize for discovering the double helix of DNA.

The list of Nobel prize winners for Physics has plenty of examples of group winners, as does the Chemistry and Medicine lists. They should give you a good basis for story hunting.
posted by underclocked at 12:55 AM on December 28, 2020

For a recent example, two women who collaborated on the discovery of CRISPR won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
posted by emd3737 at 2:12 AM on December 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Howard Florey and Ernst Chain collaborated during world war 2 to make penicillin an effective treatment, saving millions of lives, maybe more. Nice thing about this story it also highlights that fleming gets all the credit, but without florey and chain the benefits of penicillin may not have been realised for much longer
posted by Cannon Fodder at 2:20 AM on December 28, 2020

Penicillin is an excellent example, as it's not just Florey and Chain (mentioned above), but also a huge number of other people were needed to take the potential of penicillin and make it into a drug that could be manufactured in large quantities - this is a reasonable summary. You can take lots of angles about that story that bring the human interest - if I'm telling people I would probably lead with that during the darkest days of 1940 the Oxford lab team had the penicillin spores smeared into the seams of their jackets so that if the Germans invaded they would destroy their research and run; they could start again with the spores in their jackets if they reached safety.

The Manhattan Project is the obvious destructive example of this sort of collaborative research. The story to lead-in to that would be the refugees from Europe who worked on the project.
posted by Vortisaur at 3:44 AM on December 28, 2020

Does mathematics count as science for your purposes? Mathematicians routinely collaborate on proving theorems. A nice case to look at might be the solving of the Four Color Problem. (Are four colors the most you need to color any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color?) It's a math problem that's easy to understand -- though not to solve, several different teams were involved in solving it, and the solution raised interesting philosophical questions about whether computation machines could be legitimately used in mathematical proofs. There's a book about the effort to solve it called -- spoiler! -- Four Colors Suffice.
posted by bertran at 4:36 AM on December 28, 2020

>Famously, Watson and Crick shared the Nobel prize for discovering the double helix of DNA.

F-uhh-rget that version of history, it omits ripping off Rosalind Franklin whose x-ray crystallography showed the structure to Watson. The contribution is enough that the discovery of DNA's structure (and a note about the sexism of the times so that she wasn't acknowledged at all) should be credited to Franklin, Watson and Crick.
posted by k3ninho at 4:38 AM on December 28, 2020 [24 favorites]

The Nobel was shared by Watson, Crick, and Wilkins (Franklin's male boss). The official line is that because Franklin had died (as a result of her x-ray experiments) she was ineligible.

I'd argue that the DNA story is still a "genius scientist" one, though (two geniuses instead of one). For a good example of collaborative research, look at the Framingham study, which has told us nearly everything we know about heart disease.*

* in white people
posted by basalganglia at 5:28 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

In math, the great example is Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a collective of French mathematicians who made huge contributions to the field of algebra.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:57 AM on December 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

William Henry Bragg and his son, Lawrence Bragg, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for discovering Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:48 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

A general note: in the biosciences the vast majority of research is done as a collaboration. A principle investigator leads a lab of postdocs, grad students, research techs, and others. Together these people come up with ideas, perform the experiments and analyse the data.

When you talk about Doudna and Charpentier, you’re talking about the people in their labs as well. This kind of science is intrinsically collaborative.
posted by sciencegeek at 8:29 AM on December 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

If you want some graphics to help tell the story at a high level, this Patently-O blog post has some great charts showing how, since 1976, multi-inventor teams have become the norm, with almost half of all patents now coming from teams of 3 or more inventors.
posted by jedicus at 8:45 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

As soon as China announced that a novel coronavirus had been identified as the cause of the Wuhan outbreak, [the the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI)] contacted its partners that were developing MERS vaccines or working on novel platforms. With the potential for further financial support, they and others began vaccine development as soon as the first gene sequence was posted, and development is proceeding quickly.

Faster publication of virus genomes has allowed researchers to build on each other’s work.
posted by oceano at 8:55 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Paul Erdös may be known as a singular genius, but the reason for the Erdös number is that part of his genius was his large number of collaborators (a few of the most frequent are listed in the linked Wikipedia article).
posted by nat at 9:26 AM on December 28, 2020

Seconding that heavy collaboration is so much the norm in modern science that it's rare to see any single author papers, at all. Pick any splashy paper from Science or Nature etc., and you'll see lots of authors, usually from lots of institutions too. The possible exception is math, which will have more 1-2 author papers, but math isn't science, in part because you can do it with a pencil and paper and nothing else.

So perhaps you can better frame or focus your question, because to this scientist, the slightly uninteresting answer is 'Almost all scientific research done in the last several decades'.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:50 AM on December 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

The story of how we figured out that the dinosaurs died when a meteorite struck the earth is a great story of interdisciplinary collaboration (paleontology, physics, and geology). Sean B. Carroll tells it well
posted by hydropsyche at 10:46 AM on December 28, 2020

The Geiger-Marsden / Rutherford gold foil experiment, which discovered the atomic nucleus. (That is the Hans Geiger of Geiger counter fame, detecting where alpha particles go when shot at gold foil.)

The Michelson-Morley experiment which demonstrated that the velocity of the luminiferous ether relative to the observer is probably zero. (Because, as Einstein later explained, it doesn’t exist.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:55 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe invented modern astronomy. Their collaboration was somewhat tumultuous, but essentially Brahe produced the astronomical observations that Kepler synthesized into a theory of orbital motion.
posted by jedicus at 11:02 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Robert Koch is a Nobel Prize winner and one of the key figures in the history of microbiology. He worked to test out different substrates to grow test cultures, finally settling on agar, which is used today. In this he received key support from his assistant, Julius Richard Petri, who invented the namesake glass dish that the agar goes in.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:03 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Yang-Lee theory confirmed by the Wu experiment — lots of other important collaborations with other people later. And Wu lived long enough to be sort of recognized for her experimental work on the Nobel-winning theory. (It rhymes.)
posted by clew at 12:59 PM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Lots and lots of important discoveries have a pair of names associated with them. A few that come to mind for me include:

Jacob and Monod Who figured out transcriptional regulation of gene expression

Michaelis and Mentin Who developed one of the central equations in enzyme kinetics

Zinkernagel and Doherty Who figured out how T cells recognize pathogens.
posted by juliapangolin at 2:08 PM on December 28, 2020

An additional pair of iconic names: Marie and Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Nobel prize for work they did together, and they continued collaborating through his death.
posted by mark k at 3:22 PM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Lots and lots of important discoveries have a pair of names associated with them.

It's important to note that having multiple names associated with a discovery doesn't necessarily mean that the people involved collaborated, or even knew one another. Sometimes it's multiple independent workers who contributed to the same conclusion, or a later independent extension of someone else's previously published work. Just as one example off the top of my head, George Stokes was only a teenager when Claude-Louis Navier died - and yet, the Navier-Stokes equations.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:38 PM on December 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Also in math, the polymath twin primes conjecture collaboration, written about by some of the participants here (Including Terence Tao, the main organizer) is a modern example of math collaboration. Even in math collaboration is pretty normal, although the size of said collaboration may vary.
posted by nat at 5:00 PM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Marie and Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Nobel

And their daughter Irène shared the 1935 chemistry Nobel with her husband Frederic Joliot.
posted by clew at 11:49 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]