There is nothing in science that is not collaborative , yet our reward systems actively punish teamwork. Susan Fitzpatrick, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, explains why interdisciplinary research fails, what makes small-scale collaboration succeed, and why billion-dollar brain initiatives may be asking the wrong questions. Subscribe for more episodes exploring real-world collaboration. Susan Fitzpatrick brings 28 years of experience funding scientific research to a conversation that cuts through the mythology of the lone genius. Starting from her own trajectory , a biochemist who discovered the power of science communication while recording textbooks for blind students , she traces how the McDonnell Foundation evolved from outsourcing grant management to actively building research communities at the edges of established disciplines. The core argument is precise: true collaboration requires synergy, not just proximity. Fitzpatrick distinguishes between implicit collaboration (building on others' published work) and active collaboration (combining knowledge from multiple sources to answer questions no single discipline can address). She illustrates this with the foundation's work on Williams Syndrome, where understanding the path from genetic deletion to behavioral phenotype demands geneticists, neuroimagers, cognitive scientists, and clinicians working together , not just side by side. The conversation reveals hard-won lessons about what makes interdisciplinary collaboration work. Fitzpatrick identifies the critical failure point: researchers who arrive at collaborative workshops already knowing what they want to say, rather than being willing to have their understanding changed. The foundation learned to screen for intellectual humility , people who could tolerate not being the expert in the room. On large-scale science, Fitzpatrick is direct. She argues that massive brain initiatives like the European and American brain projects have generated useful tools but failed to answer fundamental questions , because the questions themselves were poorly defined. "They keep saying the brain, but what brain? Whose brain? Whose brain when? Whose brain in which context?" She contrasts this with CERN, where the question was specific enough to organize thousands of collaborators effectively. The discussion addresses the perverse incentives in academic science that undermine collaboration. Tenure committees demanding single-authored publications, the pressure to brand individual contributions, and the marketing of originality all select against collaborative temperaments. Fitzpatrick suggests these systems have, to some extent, selected for sociopaths. Her proposed fix is both practical and philosophical: eliminate the scarcity mindset , the zero-sum assumption that someone else's gain means your loss. If she could CRISPR one thing, it would be that gene. The real barrier to collaboration is not structural but psychological: people who cannot see themselves in a shared future will not invest in building one. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.
