Competition in biology; It’s a scoop
A Nature news article examines the appearance of increasing competitiveness in the life sciences, a push to get results out as fast as possible in pursuit of grants, tenure, prestige and other aims. A story is told of a couple that presented a poster and published their results, just barely ahead of four other groups that learned of their techniques through their conference presentation. Are carelessness and sloppy research on the increase as a result, or are there just isolated phenomena. (Karel Svoboda, formerly of Howard Berg’s lab at Rowland/Harvard, is among those quoted)