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Published online 16 January 2008 | Nature 451, 240-243 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451240a
News Feature
Chemistry: Power play
A German physicist and a hedge-fund magnate are competing to push protein simulations into the realm of the millisecond. Brendan Borrell finds out what is at stake.
For a while, Klaus Schulten did not mind the Godiva chocolates arriving in his team's mailboxes at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Nor was Schulten, whose biophysics group boasted one of the fastest algorithms for simulating protein structures, much concerned when his programmers received e-mails heralding a job opportunity at an undisclosed Manhattan firm that aimed to “fundamentally transform the process of drug discovery”.
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Instead of competing to upstage one another, why don't these scientists join their resources together and build a single 'most powerful and fastest' computer ever built and credit themselves for a mature, common-sense way of doing science?
" why don't these scientists join their resources together"? Because modern "science" has degenerated into a cutthroat competition for grants and publications. Look at this sentence from the article:- "Schulten's 40-strong group was attracting close to $2 million a year in grant money." That's what matters, not what his group has discovered...
"why don't these scientists join their resources together" I guess for the same reason we don't expect Honda, GM, Toyota, and Ford to join forces and build the single 'best car ever', or for Apple and Linux to stop competing with Windows, and help them build the optimal OS. Competition has its advantages (and, admittedly, disadvantages). If Shaw and Schulten built a single 'most powerful and fastest' MD code, why bother to keep improving it? They could just say it was the best code and call it a day. Like it or not, the rivalry pushes them to improve their codes at a faster pace than if it were just for 'the love of science'. I don't think science would advance very fast if we took the approach that there should only be one group working on a particular problem. Also, 'cutthroat competition' is not unique to modern science - Newton was quite ruthless towards Leibniz, and there are plenty examples like that from previous centuries. As for the money issue - $2 million/yr for a group of 40 people comes out to $50,000/person. Factoring in all expenses (overhead,equipment) that is hardly "big money".