Sir

Reading Helen Pearson's News Feature “It's a scoop!” (Nature 426, 222– 223; 2003) about competition in biology is likely to depress a lot of young researchers. What greater honour or peer recognition could there be than finding competitors relaying the results of your poster by cell phone, as described in your News Feature?

However, I believe they would be wrong to blame journals for accelerated publication or to berate competing labs for beating them to the post. One does not advance science by using faster computers, working in better-equipped labs or even spending more hours in the lab than could be considered socially normal. Science is best done between your ears. There is no stopping someone who is willing to cut corners to be first in line. The rest of us will just have to think harder and better. Satisfaction comes from knowing you did it right and it was your independent idea, not from a date on the top of your reprint.

When I was leaving the lab of my postdoctoral mentor, Eric J. Brown, I asked him whether he would be pursuing some of the same research that I was about to embark upon independently. He wisely told me that — as we were two different people — even if we did exactly the same experiment one day, we were likely to be performing different experiments the next.

Diversity of thought strengthens the overall progress of scientific inquiry. The formation (and superfunding) of consortia, research institutes and the like brings the risk of stagnation resulting from conformity.

Scoop me once, shame on me. Scoop me twice and I might ask why you aren't capable of any original thought.

I am now going home for the night.