From darwin to the census of marine life: marine biology as big science.

Niki Vermeulen,Mande Holford

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054284

Abstract

With the development of the Human Genome Project, a heated debate emerged on biology becoming ‘big science’. However, biology already has a long tradition of collaboration, as natural historians were part of the first collective scientific efforts: exploring the variety of life on earth. Such mappings of life still continue today, and if field biology is gradually becoming an important subject of studies into big science, research into life in the world's oceans is not taken into account yet. This paper therefore explores marine biology as big science, presenting the historical development of marine research towards the international ‘Census of Marine Life’ (CoML) making an inventory of life in the world's oceans. Discussing various aspects of collaboration – including size, internationalisation, research practice, technological developments, application, and public communication – I will ask if CoML still resembles traditional collaborations to collect life. While showing both continuity and change, I will argue that marine biology is a form of natural history: a specific way of working together in biology that has transformed substantially in interaction with recent developments in the life sciences and society. As a result, the paper does not only give an overview of transformations towards large scale research in marine biology, but also shines a new light on big biology, suggesting new ways to deepen the understanding of collaboration in the life sciences by distinguishing between different ‘collective ways of knowing’.

Highlights

While the discovery of space is well under way and almost every piece of land in the world has been discovered and mapped, not much is known about the world’s oceans that cover about 70% of the earth’s surface
The collaboration did reveal micro-organisms, and aimed to catalogue all the animals in the world’s oceans, including life in the deep-sea ‘‘to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans – past, present, and future’’ [1]. This means that the Census of Marine Life is part of a natural history tradition in which collaboration is necessary for the collection of research materials that are globally dispersed [2,3]
While the Human Genome Project (HGP) is often presented as the first large-scale research project in the life sciences, natural history shows that scientific collaboration is hardly new to biology

Summary

Introduction

While the discovery of space is well under way and almost every piece of land in the world has been discovered and mapped, not much is known about the world’s oceans that cover about 70% of the earth’s surface. The collaboration did reveal micro-organisms, and aimed to catalogue all the animals in the world’s oceans, including life in the deep-sea ‘‘to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans – past, present, and future’’ [1] This means that the Census of Marine Life is part of a natural history tradition in which collaboration is necessary for the collection of research materials that are globally dispersed [2,3]. While the Human Genome Project (HGP) is often presented as the first large-scale research project in the life sciences, natural history shows that scientific collaboration is hardly new to biology It is found already in the alliance between science and exploration that set out to map the world and collect and describe its diverse forms of life [4]. Does CoML still resemble traditional collaborations to collect life, or have developments in biology research and recent changes in the relation between science and society transformed marine biology research?

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Conclusion