Mixed Messages: A story about scientists being nice

Author: Dr Ed Hutchinson (April 22nd 2020)

(Edited by Elena Sugrue)

I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard someone being scooped. I was working at the bench during the first rotation project of my PhD, when there was a sharp intake of breath from my PI’s office followed by an entirely uncharacteristic fusillade of swearing. Hurrying over, the lab found her reading a new study that had reached the same exciting conclusions as one of her PhD students – and had been published first. I learnt a lot from that moment. Fortunately for me, I was working for Margaret ‘Scottie’ Robinson, who is widely recognised as not only one of the leading figures in cell biology but also one of the nicest. She immediately pivoted from personal alarm to supporting her PhD student, helping her to redirect her work into a study that, when it was finished, was strong on its own merits. But however good an example Scottie set, it was very clear that being scooped was something to worry about. From that point onwards, I have always been slightly afraid. Afraid that, whatever I’m currently working on, someone else will think it is interesting too – and will get there first.

Of course, that fear is not without its uses, as a succession of supervisors keen to see me finish projects have pointed out. But the pressure of competition also has less desirable effects. I’ve always had the good fortune to work with people who’ve made a point of prioritising openness and fairness, but like anyone in science I can reel off a long list of anecdotes about people reacting to the fear of being scooped by becoming at best secretive, at worst actively unethical. Bad behaviour always makes for a memorable story. The worst of those stories, shared in the stairwells of departments and over conference drinks, stick in the mind and support the view, shared by nearly 80% of researchers in a recent Wellcome Trust survey, that science can be grasping, secretive and unkind. It’s a dispiriting picture but, although it is not without some basis in fact, it is still at odds with the behaviour of the overwhelming majority of the scientists I’ve known. Good behaviour doesn’t normally make for a gripping tale, and so there isn’t much to balance out our anecdotes of scientists behaving badly.

This article is an attempt to push back. I was recently the beneficiary of some extremely generous (but not – importantly – abnormal) behaviour from a number of my colleagues. It led to a collaborative study on the effects of combining genetic messages from viruses and their hosts, which was supported by 54 authors across multiple institutions and got to answers we could never have reached on our own. I would like to tell you a story of people in science being nice to each other.

For me, the story started when I went to work as a postdoc with Ervin Fodor at the University of Oxford. The plan was that Ervin would train me to be an RNA biochemist, but to our mutual dismay we found that I was not very good at this. It is credit to Ervin as a mentor that he kept me on regardless, telling me to change tack and devise new projects that suited my skillset better. After a few false starts, I began using mass spectrometry to study viruses. Ervin was not only flexible but generous: when I found some intriguingly weird results using these methods, he encouraged me to use them as preliminary data in an application to set up my own group at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR).

Once at the CVR, I recruited an excellent postdoc, Liz Sloan, who worked hard to try and explain one of the most provocative of the weird results I’d brought with me from Ervin’s lab. When Liz later went on maternity leave, I was fortunate to recruit Léa Meyer to continue her work. Liz and Léa are both great scientists, but it was a complex project and we needed backup. Fortunately, scientists are a helpful bunch, and we sought help through the same channels that most scientists do. Our immediate colleagues helped a lot: bioinformaticians and bunyavirologists in the CVR, and immunologists elsewhere in the University of Glasgow. The wider community helped too: chats at conferences led to groups in Cambridge and Edinburgh offering to repurpose unpublished data, and to pathogenesis studies being carried for us out by a friend at the Gulbenkian Institute in Portugal.

Finally, we had a story more or less ready. And at this point one member of our growing collaboration e-mailed, to say that they had heard a seminar about a very similar project, and it had just been submitted, and had we seen their preprint?

It turns out that I had not been trained to react well to this sort of news. It was probably fortunate that I was in the university library at the time. Fusillades of swearing are discouraged there.

What do you do? I took some deep breaths, had a cup of tea, rang up Liz, unburdened myself the CVR’s Director, and resolved to publish what we had ASAP. (‘The worst thing that happens next,’ the Director pointed out, ‘is that you publish a paper.’) I approached PLOS Biology, partly because I’d already sounded out one of their editors about the project, and also because they have a ‘novelty window’ in which they don’t penalise you for being scooped. At the same time as submitting our manuscript we released it as a preprint and did two things that I was unsure of. Firstly, we cited the other group’s preprint and discussed it at some length, even though it wasn’t yet published. Secondly, as my group had recently introduced me to social media, I tried tweeting about both of the studies, tagging the only author from the other study I could find.

Two things then happened. First, PLOS Biology sort of liked our paper - they were interested, but wanted major revisions. Importantly, their reviewers actively supported the fact that we’d cited preprints. ‘The authors,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘are to be commended for incorporating the… pre-print into their discussion and analysis, strengthening both papers.’

Secondly, and completely out of the blue, the lead author of the other study got in touch. Ivan Marazzi isn’t on Twitter, but word had got back about the tweets. Ivan had an interesting proposal. Our studies were complementary rather than identical and he was, he said, fed up with competing against people for papers. Would we be willing to combine the studies into one publication, sharing first and last authorships? It was a risk, not least because Ivan and I had never had any contact with each other before (part of the reason we were in this situation to begin with). But I discussed it with my co-authors and we decided that the collaboration was worth the risk.

The first thing to note is that PLOS Biology were just great. They’d been really good to work with up to this point – clear, rapid responses, constructive reviews – and they were also extremely understanding when we then withdrew our submission. The second thing to note is that combining two massive studies is really hard. It’s hard for the obvious reason (picking them both apart and putting them back together). It’s hard because you have to keep 53 co-authors in the loop and on board while doing that. And it’s hard because Ivan and I write in very different styles. I hope that the end result includes the better features of both of our approaches. I certainly learnt how to put my own preferences aside for the good of the paper, which is an important lesson to learn. I also learnt other lessons which I will try to hold on to: that preprints and social media can be part of the development of a paper as well as part of its promotion, and that pursuing an outcome in which everyone gets credit for their research is also a way to pursue the richest scientific story.

While working on this study I warmed to social media so much that I wrote a version of this article up as a very long thread on Twitter, complete with an amateur foray into GIFS. It finished by thanking the people involved: all of the many, many people who chose to collaborate with us, and in particular the scientific generosity of both Ervin and Ivan, who between them bookended a major part of my transition to becoming an independent researcher. That thread got (at least by my normal standards) quite a bit of interest – much more for its story of collaboration than for the actual science. It also got a certain amount of pushback.

‘That was… brave’ someone noted, when I told them that neither Ivan nor I knew each other before he reached out. Several people used a selection of expressive emojis to indicate how stressful they thought it would be to keep several dozen co-authors engaged during rounds of re-writes. And a few people, who know me well, asked me why, if this had all be so great, I had spent quite so much time complaining bitterly to them while I was working on it. And that’s all fair enough. I didn’t want to imply that any of this was easy, or risk-free, or even particularly fun (although some of it was fun). I just wanted to give you one more anecdote to reinforce the idea that working openly and supporting each other in science is achievable, is worth the risks – and is normal.

‘I think this kind of thing happens more than we know in science,’ commented @TheOtherDGill on Twitter, ‘but few share the story.’ It seemed worth a try.

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Postscript: While finalising this article, I opened Twitter and discovered that Ivan had – once again – got there first.