Impact of Genentech’s science on academia
I recently read a book by Sally Smith Hughes about the early years of Genentech, a company that started the biotech industry in the late 70s.
The book is well written and contains some fascinating information about the people who led the development of Genentech.
However, one of the revealing pieces of information for me was about how Genentech’s premier scientific work impacted academia, and specifically academia-derived science publication.
Before Genentech started to publish its research in high profile journals like Nature or Science, academia-derived science publications were authored by 2–3 individuals, basically a postdoc or graduate student and the principal investigator. This was the norm.
However, Genentech, as a for-profit organization, organized its scientific work on new industry standards in order to accelerate scientific discovery. This meant that Genentech’s research articles typically had a dozen authors. Each author contributed from his/her own narrow field of expertise.
This was in stark contrast to the then academia approach where one or two individuals were tasked to develop all the necessary methods and to do all the necessary experiments for a given article. This approach was of course more time consuming, and end products were not necessarily of higher publication quality.
It is difficult to believe today but at that time, academia scientists ridiculed Genentech’s authorship policies.
And what happened in the end? If you examine academia-derived research articles in biology these days, the vast majority of them will have dozens of authors. Only very rarely can one encounter papers with only 2–3 authors. Basically, academia copied Genentech’s scientific approach.
These changes in academia-derived publications however had enormous unforeseen impact on science. Since only 1st and last authors get all the attention in research articles, the prospect for a given postdoc of getting high profile research article fell dramatically. Moreover, the need to have people with all types of narrow technical skills in the lab produced the current “evergreen” postdoc surplus who have no real hope of becoming principal investigators themselves.
Even these days some people frequently mistakenly repeat that the difference between working in academia versus industry is the difference between individualism versus team work. However, as current publication records show, this is outdated and a misconception.
Today, differences between a typical good academia lab and a typical good biotech lab are minimal or even non-existent. Team work is essential in both places since advances in scientific methodology have made cooperation between individuals an obvious and natural outcome.
posted by David Usharauli
