(Key points: Ultimately, every disease like cancer will have only one mechanism prevails. With all of those revolutionary technologies like OMICS it requires a massive and closely coordinated research project in order to claim a final victory on cancer or all other complex diseases. It is a doable and practical job with a successful precedence. But this time it relies on private sector and nonprofit organizations with help from government agencies to reach the goal to benefit humanity.)
In his landmark investigative report appeared in Fortune magazine Mr. Clifton Leaf gave many reasons why the science and biomedical community failed to realize the promise on cure cancer after a long and costly struggle. One of them was the small workshop culture. The community has worked in this model for several decades. Each principle investigator creates his/her own idea, and obtains funding to do research. Even sometimes the scientists claim to have a large coordinated research project with many co-authors in a published paper, in its core it is still a “small workshop” setting, lacking of a massive, coordinated assault on cancer. The National Institute of health tried other funding mechanisms like SPORE (“specialized programs of research excellence”) grants or the Program Projects to encourage cooperative researches focused on big pictures. Nothing works, there are no any big problems solved.
If this problem is not so obvious before high-throughput technology emerges, it becomes increasingly clear that this has been a big problem to deal with a vast volume of data generated by all those powerful tools: genomics, proteomics, interactomics, metabolomics, expressomics, and its growing list. For any scientists who publish a results based on OMICS method it is impossible for them to verify even a tiny portion of those data set. On the other hand for vast majority of scientist who still perform his/her own independent research, it is became increasingly hard to judge the relative importance and relevance of the particular project when compared his/her special and narrow studying object to the rest.
It is time to change this small workshop culture. Like an agricultural transformation the day when a single farm lives on itself with independence and self sufficiency has forever gone. Similarly, if a research project doesn’t contribute to a large and big picture, that research may become trivial and irrelevant. To achieve an ultimately victory on cancer a massive and closely coordinated research is the answer, and the only answer.
When internet becomes ubiquitous and people can easily connect each other, most people simply drown in the ocean of the information. Some may think that the era of grand idea is dead precisely when a grand idea can emerge from unexpected people and in unexpected place after empowered by all those unprecedented tools. Every individual can work together to make a great contribution to a common cause. All needed is a mindset change and work on one platform and fix all our eyes on one goal. The IT revolution and OMICS technology give us a golden opportunity to finish cancer project like the Manhattan Project. With two great leaders, one was Dr. Robert Oppenheimer as a scientific visionary and another person Major General Leslie Groves with strong funding and logistics support, the Manhattan Project was done successfully. At its peak there were 130,000 persons exclusively focused on one goal and one goal only. In the current economic situation there is no way the government can support such big project. It is a duty for private sector and nonprofit organizations, with help from government agencies, to do this work. With all gradients in the place this is a doable and practical job, and for an urgent purpose of saving dying cancer patients and ourselves it has to be successfully finished, sooner or later.
Please pause for a minute, and ask this simple question: are you still working in small workshops?
(This article is the seventh in a series of “the Brand New Mindset for Cancer” essays. It is published on 9/6/2011.)
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