Where credit is due.

Vivian Siegel is at the Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) Scholarship builds not only from published results, but also from the unpublished work, ideas, reagents and goodwill of others. We need to acknowledge this – to celebrate this – every chance we get Anyone who has done biomedical research knows that a lot of work precedes a single meaningful result. The time spent purifying a protein, sorting flies, troubleshooting a method, or chasing ideas that ultimately prove to be dead ends can seem infinite. Some experiments simply require a huge amount of repetitive and tedious data collection. If we did research in isolation, the balance of thinking and doing would be unbearable, with far too little time spent on the former to warrant an advanced degree. It’s one of the reasons that music or the voices of National Public Radio emanate from many labs – it’s an attempt to keep minds engaged. In the labs where I was happiest and most productive, we occupied our minds by discussing science, by troubleshooting each other’s experiments, by thinking about the next steps, by fantasizing about risky experiments that would be amazing if they worked, and by challenging ourselves to consider alternative explanations for exciting results. White boards were everywhere, covered with experimental designs and sketches of ideas. In the labs where I was happy but less productive, we talked about politics more often than science; white boards were limited to the hallway and the conference room. Finally, in the labs where I felt unhappy, productive or not, talking was the exception rather than the rule and white boards held little more than general lab announcements. For me, at least, talking about science was essential for a great lab environment that both refined my ideas and sparked my enthusiasm for research. One thing I learned from all that talking is that great ideas come from all sorts of people – from mentors, surely, but also from postdocs, graduate students and technicians. In fact, the best idea I ever had came from a conversation with a first-year graduate student who pushed me to think hard about a protocol I had already done dozens of times. Other ideas came from scribbling on a lab-mate’s white board, from lab meetings, and from other people having conversations of their own about my research. Sometimes conversations lead to collaborations. Perhaps one person has a reagent or methodological expertise that the other lacks. Perhaps a scientific relationship develops in which a colleague becomes a critical sounding board for new ideas, experimental design or interpretation of data. Collaborations of any kind provide substantial contributions to the work that is done and the knowledge that ensues; all should be acknowledged, sometimes by authorship.