The September 30 issue of Nature ran a piece about research sabotage at the University of Michigan, where a postdoc in a particular lab who deliberately ruined a fellow grad student's work by poisoning her cell culture media, among other things. Sadly, research sabotage is not unheard of, although in many cases it's an act of desperation.
A while back, one of my cohort members was talking about self-sabotaging labs, or labs that consisted mostly of postdocs. She called them self-sabotaging because of the intense competition between the members -- whoever has the best idea or approach to a problem gets funded. That's not to say all labs that have a lot of postdocs work that way, but sometimes intense competition fuels jealousy, which in turn leads to wrecking other people's work.
But where to draw the line? One of my friends went to a conference last year where the people present were so scared of getting scooped (having their ideas stolen) that they refused to interact with each other. Research is all about ideas... figuring out the right questions to ask in light of what's already known. And the best way to figure out if you have a good idea or not is to bounce them off the right people. For my case, it would be my labmates and my advisor. For the independent scientist with their own lab, it would be other people in the field. However, unless you already have decades of experience in the field, how would you know who would turn out to be a good collaborator versus someone who could scoop your ideas? Where do you draw the line at how much of your ideas to share versus what to keep hidden?
It would be an impossible ideal to have scientists collaborate with each other all the time. Grant money is tight and hard to come by, awarded to those with the best or most promising ideas...but unless you're a reclusive genius, good ideas are hardly the work of one individual. Which brings back the question... where does one draw the line between keeping it a secret and collaborating with someone else? Are there ways to minimize getting scooped?
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In the movie Inception, the main character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) states "what is the world's most dangerous parasite? An idea...it will consume you."
