above: © istock.com, jurgenfr
“Research parasite.” When a pair of physicians publicized the term in a 2016 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, it was an inflammatory way to call out researchers who didn’t generate their own data but instead used data produced by others to make novel discoveries. Increasing data sharing, the authors warned, would lead to a parasite proliferation.
But not everyone agreed with the perspective. Casey Greene, a genomics researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, read the editorial and thought “it was essentially describing a good scientist—someone who looks skeptically at other people’s data,” he says. “I thought it was an opportunity to take the absurd, which was the sort of idea that those people are parasites, and turn it into a more productive conversation, which is the idea that this is actually a good practice and should be recognized.”
Thus were born the tongue-in-cheek ...
