SUPERSIZING SCIENCE

In recent years there has been a clear rise in scientific collaboration, as well as in studies on the subject. While most scholars examine disciplines traditionally known to be collaborative, such as physics and space research, this book focuses on biology. It investigates the growing collaboration in the life sciences, or the emergence of what is called big biology. While the Human Genome Project is often presented as the first large-scale research project in biology, cooperation in the life sciences has a longer history. A comparison between centralised big physics and big biology reveals how the latter has a networked structure, which evolved in interaction with the integration of information and communication technologies. By concentrating on the construction of these networks, three contemporary large-scale research collaborations are analysed