Bioinformatician Pedro Beltrao has posted what is probably the most thought-provoking article I’ve read all year.

His basic tenet is that the the current mechanisms by which scientific research is produced have become counter-productive. Rather than just whingeing about it he proposes an alternative mechanism.

During my ill-fated career as a PhD student the constant feeling of being in competition with everyone else was something I hated. That was probably partly due to my state-of-mind at the time but I always got the impression that talking to other scientists was a bad thing.

In my current job I deal with researchers in several different fields. Many of them are doing really cool research that I would love to talk about but I don’t.

Pedro’s suggestion may turn out to be unworkable but I applaud the sentiment.