The Hoard addendum

So I think my post about the Hoard was somewhat rambling and failed to make any clear point. My concern is this: science has outgrown its incentive structure. Good science needs to be done on a scale that involves many hardworking individuals, not all of which will be writing the manuscript and scribbling their name at the front of the author list.

Take, as an example, a massive study to sequence genes in cancer X. This is going to involve intellectual contribution from dozens of people, if not hundreds. Doctors will be involved in enrolling patients and providing detailed clinical annotations of their progress. Surgeons will carefully select samples. Pathologists will carefully grade those samples and possibly select which can truly be classified as cancer X and sent to the lab. Lab workers will perfect protocols, churn them through a pipeline they design. Bioinformaticians and statisticians will then undergo a rigorous analysis of resulting data, perhaps even writing new programs and methods for their processing.

The result, surely, is going to be an enormous multiauthor publication or series of publications. None of this could happen without a few organizing minds at the top, and they, rightfully, claim a great deal of the credit. But what of the multitude of other researchers also involved? They are sandwiched somewhere between et. and al., without the due credit many of them deserve. Much of their work is crammed, often in tiny font, into the often discarded 'methods' section.

To come back around, I am concerned for my place as a growing scientist in the sea of collaborative studies. I truly enjoy the thrill of pushing back scientific boundaries, and specifically I think that modern sequencing offers a powerful tool to do just that. But as a new graduate student who will not be leading the studies, I am concerned that these projects lead me nowhere towards a first author publication. I'm therefore treading water with respect to fulfilling my requirements for graduation. I want very much to be a good scientist and even more to work on important discoveries, but I worry that some ways of doing that come at the expense of my own career.