Kay Lazar's piece in this morning's Boston Globe is another worth the click: "Harvard medical researchers to pool work." For access to hundreds of millions in NIH grants over the next five years, the mano a mano among Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals also will have to give sway to a new martial art: cooperation. Grant criteria mandate that fierce competitors work together on specific projects, forming always-on "communities of practice" that cross organizational boundaries. The purpose of the arrangement is to "shorten the time it takes to turn discovery into treatment." Harvard Medical School hands out the allowances. NB: The grants represent only a portion of NIH research dollars available to the institutions but still it's a great start in putting our best medical minds together here in Boston:
There will be matchmakers to introduce scientists who have never met because they have been hunkered in their isolated research labs. A massive, centralized database will give Harvard's researchers instant access to one another's work.
..."There has always been a disincentive to collaborate," said Dr. Lee Nadler, codirector of Harvard's new Clinical and Translational Science Center, which will link researchers and allocate Harvard's grant money..
"If we succeed in doing what we are trying to do, then it will become far easier for studies that relate to specific diseases to be carried out for the maximum benefit of patients," he said. "We also will be training people to carry out this type of collaborative research in the future."
Last year, Johns Hopkins University was awarded one of the new grants from NIH in an earlier round of funding, and leaders there have since found collaboration to be a strong learning experience.
