Question: What are your hopes for your studies

The thing I’d like to do in the next few years is this: I want to change the way science is done to make it faster.

Normally scientists work in secret. They try to achieve a certain thing before someone else. If someone is the first to do something, they often become famous for being the first person. History is full of stories of people racing to be first to discover something.

Now what matters, really, is the science, not the person who discovered it. If Newton had not seen a rainbow coming out of a prism, someone else would. The important thing is that we understand things, not who did it.

But if you work in secret, you keep stuff secret, and that slows down other people working on the same thing. If you share everything then maybe you discover something at the same time as a bunch of other people, but you get there faster. I just want to understand things as fast as I can – I’m kind of impatient.

So what I want to do is show that we can solve problems faster if we work together, and share everything. This is kind of obvious, but for various really boring reasons a lot of science is not done like this. People try to beat other people, so don’t share. Scientists sometimes won’t, for example, talk about experiments that gave bad results, because that looks bad for them. Sometimes we only tell people about the good results, because we want to impress people. But you know what? In science you need to know what doesn’t work AND what does work.

Sharing of everything, where everyone can take part, is called “open source” in computer software. Lots of really impressive things are open source – things like Wikipedia, and the web browsers you might be using right now (Firefox? Chrome?). These things have been created by a lot of people all working together.

I’d like to show we can do that in science. Actually, we have just shown it – the drug we’re working on – we discovered a new way to make it because we uploaded everything to the internet and allowed everyone to see what we were doing. A few companies around the world helped us out, and we solved a problem faster than if we’d just been working on our own.

So what’s the plan? Now we want to show that we can find a NEW DRUG using this open source idea. So everyone works together on the internet, and does experiments in their labs, and shares everything. We think this will make the research faster, and we think it’ll make the drugs cheaper. We’re about to start this project and are very excited. The drug would be for malaria, which is a very nasty disease that kills about a million people a year, mainly kids under 5.

If we can do that, then maybe we’ll change the way science is done. Actually, you know what? I think this WAS how science was done when it was “invented” but in the last hundred years or so we kind of forgot that. Also, the internet is a truly amazing thing, and we’re not using it properly to work together to solve tough problems.

So my hopes are that doing science together on the web will make science go faster. And we’re starting with drug discovery.