The Magic of the Collective, by Kai Simons, 2023, Amazon Publishing Plus, 246 pages, ISBN-10: ‎1917007027

The Finnish-born biochemist and cell biologist Kai Simons is known for his work on lipid rafts and the trans-Golgi network, and he also played a role in the founding of EMBL, EMBO and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. In this memoir book, he reflects on his fascinating career during key decades of scientific endeavour in Europe, but it is more than a personal history: it touches everyone who is fascinated by the idea of ​​research as a career. How does a promising young researcher know which research field is the right one? Is it better to focus on research on your own or as part of a larger research community? How to choose research topics, how to create a path to a successful project? And how to create a research unit that is more than the sum of its parts?

While reading the book, I experienced several awakenings about how lucky I have been to listen to my own inner voice. While doing my dissertation, I realized that the happiest moments of my life up to that point were when I was around 7–8 years old, standing in the middle of a swamp wondering what all the amazing things are in nature. After that awakening, in the final stages of my dissertation, it was easy to make the decision to move from traditional physics topics towards life sciences. After the postdoc phase, when starting to build my own group, I realized that if you do it alone, it's quite difficult to achieve anything more significant. My inner voice told me that it was worth teaming up, so we formed a joint team with my good friend Mikko Karttunen (now at Western University, Canada), where our two groups cooperated systematically at the same university. Without this community and cooperation, I would hardly have continued in science for very long, struggling almost alone.

Indeed, as indicated by the book’s title, the importance of research collaboration and community is a key theme of the memoir. Humans are characterized by the need to be part of a community and thereby create cooperation, and it has been suggested that this was the reason why Homo Sapiens was so successful. Still, at the same time, there are fields in science such as mathematics, where doing research alone and writing articles as the sole author is still quite a typical norm. Once, while sitting at lunch with my physicist and chemist colleagues, my good friend, a mathematician, joined us and started a lively conversation by stating with amusement, "You cheat when you work together and then write papers with more than one author." During the discussion, we noted that behind many breakthroughs there is often only one or two people with a vision, and without this Monty Python-like ability to see and do something completely different, the breakthrough idea would never have been born. But on the other hand, would the breakthrough have happened if these individual people had tried to do their project alone? There are fields like particle physics where it is normal for articles to have hundreds or thousands of co-authors [e.g., the paper that experimentally confirmed the Higgs particle has around 3000 co-authors (Atlas collaboration/CERN)], highlighting how critical it is to get the community to collaborate on research ideas in implementation. And we all know how important it is to chat among colleagues in the coffee room, developing and improving ideas together. That famous added value! 

How can cooperation be implemented successfully? Even if research resources are weak, can collaboration still produce high-quality science? How should we build communities and research units where cooperation fuels success? How can we motivate people to cooperate, if the credit for success often goes to one person? What are the critical mistakes that almost inevitably lead to failure? Among other things, Simons ponders these questions meritoriously in his memoir.

The book in no way denies the importance of the visions and expertise of individual researchers. However, what can be achieved alone or only with the help of one's own group has its limits. You can go further by combining know-how and cooperation. Simons deals with this broad theme through his own life, starting with his youth and his student activities in Finland, because even then he realized the power of collaboration. In the same spirit, he reflects on the added value brought by cooperation in numerous stages of his career, starting with his dissertation (MD in 1964), progressing to the postdoc phase in New York (1965–1967) and through the work done back in Finland (1968–1975), to the initiation and development of EMBL's activities in Heidelberg (1975–1998), where he became a group leader, and later to the founding of the Max Planck Institute (Dresden) in Germany, where he was one of its directors (1998–2006) and also a group leader (until 2012). As discussed in the memoir, during this era, Europe was reshaped in many ways, the European Research Council (ERC) started its activities, and the world went through crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, for which we were scientifically partially prepared thanks to the basic research carried out over the years and the applied science developed from it.

To be able to appreciate the scope of the era described in the memoir, it is good to understand that it starts from a time when there was no super-resolution microscopy, and not even color television. But, the technological development of science has been exceptionally innovative and progressed rapidly, again emphasizing the importance of cooperation, when scientists have joined forces with technical experts to develop new methods. A significant number of Nobel prizes, for example, have been awarded for the development of new methods, such as cryo-EM, because without them breakthrough discoveries would not have been made either. This development of technology and methods can be felt throughout the memoir.

Simons has seen and experienced what a researcher's career can be in conditions where research funding is scarce, i.e., non-existent, in which case the importance of cooperation is critical. On the other hand, in numerous positions, he has been able to see how funding alone does not guarantee success, but even in those circumstances the importance of cooperation is emphasized. If the term "retired" can be used in Simons' case, then of course, after reaching retirement age, one can also found a company (Lipotype GmbH) that helps the research community, which does science and uses its results to promote health, while standing firmly on its own feet with its collective. This perspective, together with wide-ranging positions of trust that Simons has held, gives his views weight.

Senior scientists will be able to sense from the book the strategic choices, focusing on collaboration, that an ambitious research group needs to succeed. At the highest level, if you can say so, the book contains a valuable discussion about how large research units and laboratories should be created and developed, and how their greatest potential can be lost if there is no collaboration that creates added value. For those developing activities in the university sector, I would assume that the book will give rise to a lot of food for thought.

I still especially recommend this book to young researchers. Many of them are certainly interested in reading ideas about how to find your own way, and how amid tough competition you can still strive towards your dreams, trusting in the power of cooperation.

There are many stories in a long life, and there are many of them in the book. The book is positive for life and genuinely funny.

I've experienced the feeling a few times that once you've opened a book, you can't stop reading it until you've reached the end. This is one of them. A lovely reading experience.

Top image of post: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay