© AKINDO/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMIn 2012, MIT researcher Chris Burge was sitting in an airport on his way to a systems biology meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Next to him sat Ben Blencowe, a leader in alternative splicing at the University of Toronto, who was also en route to the meeting. The two had known each other for years and had even overlapped as postdocs in Phil Sharp’s lab at MIT. Burge recalls telling Blencowe about a comparative analysis of alternative splicing among different species that his group was working on when the two realized they were homing in on the same thing—and both were getting close to publishing their results.
In ordinary circumstances, the realization that another group is closing in on answering a question similar to one your own lab has been working on might instill the fear of getting scooped. But in this case, the researchers made an arrangement: rather than trying to beat each other to publication, they would attempt to get both papers out at the same time. “We had this agreement that we would not share our results, but we would share our publication status,” says Burge. By keeping their results private, the labs would maintain their independence and not bias one another’s review of their data. “We were hoping it would be a tie so nobody’s student or postdoc would be crushed.”
Several months later and within a few ...
