"Still in process": collaborative authorship in a twentieth-century biomedical textbook.

Although drama and film rely on collaboration, the arts can otherwise be a solitary endeavor. We think of the painter, the composer, the writer withdrawing to the studio or loft or room apart, as Alphonse Daudet withdrew to his windmill for the Lettres. In the past, science too could be pursued alone. Newton and Darwin were great individualists and discoverers: their works had single authorship. But in modern times, with new techniques that result in vastly accumulating data, science must now be a collaborative endeavor. Only the many fragments will lead to the whole. This increasing reliance on collaboration in the work of science is expanding to the multiple authorships of science textbooks which, like evolution itself, must change with the new developments, and so undergo regularly rewritten editions. The following is my account of tracing a unique and close collaboration between six outstanding scientists-a Canadian, two Americans, three British. They -lived together over periods of time in order to forge a coherent, lucid, readable text for university students on cell biology with a molecular approach. Their I book has had a profound influence on pedagogy and communication in their field. But, as with Chaucer's pilgrims, a motley crew travelling in close quarters, the journey itself was full of humor, exhaustion, cynicism, faith, hard work, argument, discovery, and a shared experience that made it real and satisfying.