Question: If you ever found the reason why people get brain diseases, would you immediately share it with the world or not? Also would you share the 'spotlight' with other people who worked with you?

Dawn Lau answered on 22 Jun 2016:

Yes to both! Science is not so immediate, though. When we discover new things, we have to repeat it a few times (at least 3) to make sure it’s not just a fluke. And then we send it to be published by a scientific journal. The journal sends your article out to other expert scientists for peer review. This is to make sure that the experiments we’ve done are scientifically good. They might suggest extra experiments to do to make our arguments stronger, or they might think the science data isn’t good enough and reject the article. Only once you’ve addressed the reviewer’s comments, THEN the article will be published. The process from submitting an article to publishing could take between weeks to months!

Scientific papers have many authors – that is how we share the spotlight. I would definitely put my colleagues as authors if they had anything to do with the work in the paper.