When Alvin Weinberg coined the phrase ‘Big Science’ almost 40 years ago, the “monuments” to it that he listed — “huge rockets, high-energy accelerators, high-flux reactors” — were all identified with the physical sciences. To many, high-energy physics was the prototypical Big Science, and Weinberg himself — to the chagrin of many biologists — described such endeavours as “symbols of our time”.

There have been times recently when the biologists have seemed keen to take over this mantle. In the early days of the Human Genome Project, for example, there was much talk of how this would put genetics into the Big Science league. Furthermore, US politicians are sending signals that their support for particle accelerators may be ending (see page 390) just at a time when the National Institutes of Health is making its first major contributions to the construction of synchrotron radiation facilities (see page 395). It is tempting to talk in terms of the swing of a pendulum, and to suggest that biology is now beginning to enjoy the role that physics and space-based research have occupied for the past 50 years.

Such a characterization is misleading. Weinberg and those who picked up his Big Science idea were thinking of large experimental facilities that became the centrepiece of one or a few major collaborative research programmes. In contrast, the new synchrotrons and other devices are multi-user, multi-experimental facilities.

Furthermore, a key characteristic of the new facilities is that their use is not dominated by any one scientific discipline. The rapidly growing use of synchrotrons by structural biologists, or even of space missions by ‘exobiologists’, does not represent a take-over in any sense. Rather, both moves illustrate a more significant and longlasting trend: the growing collaboration between separate scientific disciplines, and thus the emergence at new scales of a truly interdisciplinary approach to scientific problems. Big Science is not dead — it is merely coming of age.