Institute For The Future

Open Bioscience: Where Will the Distributed Scientists Go to Work?

IFTF researcher David Pescovitz shared an article from Nature News today that covers the proliferation of crowdsourced biodata sharing. Recent months have seen a flurry of launches of open, loosely structured repositories of complex biochemical pathways like WikiPathways, Protein Data Bank Wiki and WikiGene. Building on the good head of steam around open science journals like PLoS Biology, PloS Computation Biology and PLoS Genetics, these new models and platforms for scientific discourse threaten to be highly disruptive.

As this article reports:

 

“Right now, it’s the large sequencing centres that are distributing the information,” says Andrew Su, a bioinformaticist at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation in San Diego, California. “The scientist working on their one protein at the bench doesn’t have a way to participate in that process.”

 

The upheaval of long-established scientific institutions and the practices and conventions that hold them together is a central focus of the research agenda for the newly launched Science In Place project here at the Institute for the Future. As the glue that binds R&D clusters together gets loosened, the pieces - people, tools, facilities - are freed up to move about and recombine into new structures.

If we consider it plausible that open science could democratize access to data and outlets for distribution (as in the quote above), reducing the scale of investment for any one individual or organization to participate in biological research, what happens when you have a lot of that? Without big institutions to cluster around (like the NIH or universities), do geographic clusters form at all? Obviously, independent open source biologists need some support systems and won't all work at home, but what new kinds of places will need to be created for them? Many of these issues are playing out across the knowledge workforce, as more and more co-working experiments challenge the traditional ways of "warehousing" knowledge work, but emerging science fields are pushing these new practices to the extreme. The key lies in understanding the kinds of collaborative work in these emerging disciplines that is most productively done face-to-face and what can be digitally evaporated.

These are the kinds of things we'll be thinking about and forecasting in Science In Place.