January 2010: Open lecture by Niki Vermeulen

In recent years there has been a clear rise in scientific collaboration, as well as in studies on the subject. While most scholars examine disciplines traditionally known to be collaborative, such as physics and space research, my research focuses on biology. It investigates the growing collaboration in the life sciences, or the emergence of what is called 'big biology'. While the Human Genome Project is often presented as the first large-scale research project in biology, cooperation in the life sciences has a longer history. A comparison between centralised 'big physics' and 'big biology' reveals how the latter has a networked structure, which evolved in interaction with the integration of information and communication technologies.

While concentrating on the construction of these networks, I analyse three contemporary large-scale research collaborations: the Census of Marine Life that aims to make an inventory of life in the oceans, the Silicon Cell initiative that wants to design a replica of a cell in a computer, and the VIRGO consortium, which investigates host-virus interaction to develop a new therapy against influenza. These projects demonstrate how the process of making science bigger, or the 'supersizing of science', transforms the ways in which science is organised while it also changes the work of scientists involved.