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Asked by anon-349098 on 9 Mar 2023. This question was also asked by anon-357658, anon-357522.
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Liz Barron-Majerik answered on 9 Mar 2023:
I have worked with a few scientists over the years. That’s one of the good things about science, you rarely work on your own – its normally with other people. It means you can get more done, as everyone works on a different part of the puzzle. It also means when it gets hard, other people can help!
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Sam Mugford answered on 15 Mar 2023:
I work in a research group of 8 people (at the moment). While we all have our own research projects, we work very closely together, discuss our work in lab meetings every week and help each other with experiments. I help to supervise the less experienced students to teach them how to do some of the experiments as well. I also work closely with a lot of other scientists here at the John Innes Centre, there are people here who are leading experts in so many different areas of biology, there is so much to learn from them. It’s really important as a scientist to talk about your work with many different people who will know things about different aspects of your work that you might not even think of unless you talk to them. Science is an extremely collaborative processes and only very rarely do research projects get completed only by one person on their own.
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Alexandra Milliken answered on 15 Mar 2023:
I work in a lab of 20, so I am used to working with other scientists. However, as I am new to my career, I have not yet worked with many outside of my lab. The more conferences I go to, hopefully the more connections I will make, which should open up future collaborations!
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Martin Vickers answered on 15 Mar 2023:
I work with lots of scientists. I am one of eight bioinformaticians in our team, and we work with each other and other teams to solve problems. Working with other scientists is one of the most rewarding parts of my job.
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Caroline Stone answered on 16 Mar 2023:
Yes. At the moment I work in a research group with 9 other people, and we are always talking to each other about our projects and giving help, advice, and ideas. Even though we have our own projects, they are all interconnected around the same topic (in our case, how the immune system of rice plants recognises and fights off fungal diseases).
Our lab is based in a research institute in Norfolk called the John Innes Centre (the same as Sam). Like Sam said already, it is really important to have lots of other scientists around so that we can talk to each other. Sometimes you talk to someone and they have an idea to help you, or you can think of a way to help them.
We also work together with other scientists in other countries in collaborations. This works really well when each of the labs has a particular technique they are good at because then we can build up multiple pieces of evidence to support our hypothesis on how things are working.
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Ian Adams answered on 22 Mar 2023:
yes a key part of science is working with other scientists and sharing ideas. Love working either through zoom or by travelling with scientists from across the world. Did some work recently that started as a UK plant disease but by talking to other people we eventually ended up working with scientists from Belgium, Netherlands, France, USA, Canada and New Zealand who had all found the same thing
Comments
Andrew commented on :
All the time! Whilst we may think that science is an individual pursuit, everything in the modern scientific world is done as a team. We work together to solve problems because different people bring different ideas and perspectives to the problem. This means we get a better understanding of the problem faster, and as Liz said, we can put lots of different skills together to combine different pieces of information to piece the puzzle together.
Ian commented on :
One of the best bits. Always happier working with other scientists and not against them. I am an expert in a small area of science. working with others means you can combine your knowledge. Looking at my diary this week I have a meeting with a group of east African plant disease scientists to discuss the best way to diagnose plant viral diseases and a chat with an Australian scientist about the work we are doing together on his collection of old dried plant leaves with diseases from the seventies. He collected them when he used to work in Peru so we are also working with Peruvian scientists to compare them to what they find now. All this while sitting at my desk at home near York
Phil commented on :
Lots. The best science is teamwork. Nobody knows the answers to everything and its often really helpful to get input from someone else with a different point of view and a different set of skills