The much anticipated powering-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has certainly captured the imagination of people the world over. Built in an existing 27-kilometer circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border at a cost of approximately US$5 billion, the LHC was designed to smash protons together to solve some of the basic mysteries of the universe. It is not difficult to see how such an exotic goal—no doubt the envy of scientists in other fields—can foster wonder about science in the public's imagination. Aside from the obvious financial constraints, what are some of the basic issues physicists had to overcome before building the LHC?

An obvious one is agreement among scientists on an appropriate goal. The LHC has been the aim of a considerable portion of the physics community for three decades, with hundreds of scientists agreeing that it was necessary. This seems simple enough, yet few might argue that similar collective agreement about what 'needs to be done' forms less frequently in other scientific fields—such as in biological research. Why?

One possibility is that the fundamental questions to be addressed—on par with solving basic mysteries of the universe—may not in fact be as well defined in other fields as they apparently are in physics, so it is not hard to see the difficulty of other researchers' taking a collective step in one direction. This may be especially true in the biological sciences, in which people undertake solving 'their own' scientific questions and independent efforts do not easily align into a single 'big picture' that provides a definitive conclusion on what to do next—although occasionally they do, as when the human genome was sequenced.

Perhaps even more important for an 'LHC-like' project is that the scientists involved must transcend the singular goals of individual advancement, reward and acknowledgment for discovery. Biologists in particular seem to be solitary creatures who, by dint of professional expectation ('you must have X number of first-author papers to get an interview or a job here!'), often shy away from collective work and sharing the spotlight.

Such obstacles, which hopefully can be overcome, stand in the way of the potential payback of projects on the scale of the LHC, including discoveries that would have been impossible otherwise, and fostering more study of science.