You Can't be the Lone Ranger Anymore Posted on February 20, 2006 David J. Kupfer (bio) stresses the importance of collaboration in research.

I was interested in - growing up as a young child who probably grew up certainly before computers, not exactly before television, but close - so I grew up a little bit on the Lone Ranger and Tonto and all that kind of stuff on the radio, and the only thing that I sort of take away from the Lone Ranger is that science doesn't work that way anymore.

You don't want to be out riding by yourself somewhere, because it's not going to work in the long run. Science has truly become a very collaborative process, and for those of you who have a certain degree of social phobia or paranoia, you're going to have to deal with those things, because it seems to me that you're going to have to learn how to collaborate.

Certainly, the issue of peer review, and here we're not simply talking about your grants, but being able to open up and consult in the broadest sense of the term, I think is very, very important.

There's no such thing as having just one mentor. If you do, that's probably not enough. You need role models; you need scientific collaborators; you need consultants. You'd be amazed how important this network that you begin to develop even as you're starting out now becomes vitally important really throughout your entire academic career.

At the same time that I talk about networking with scientific colleagues, it's important to realize that you want to get to know the people who run the various funding agencies, particularly individuals in the government. It's OK, and it's probably absolutely vital that you get to know the people who are on certainly the program side at the National Institutes and particularly, in most of your cases, the National Institutes of Mental Health. Know your program officers.

Realize that they actually are reasonably aligned with what you want to do. They're not in the position of making the peer review decisions about whether what you are doing is really terrible or very, very good.

In fact they are a tremendous ongoing source of assistance, and that kind of technical assistance is help in general, I think, and you'll hear about certainly more about it if you didn't yesterday, is again something that is important over time to maintain, because if you're worried about say your first K award now, maybe 5 or 10 years from now, you're going to be worried about R01s and other kinds of collaborative mechanisms, and it's very likely that some of these people will still be there in the government and be able to help you.

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