The Guardian

We hail individual geniuses, but success in science comes through collaboration | Jeremy Farrar

This week’s Nobel winners will have drawn on teams, often multinational, now threatened by Brexit
‘Even in the individual labs of most leading scientists, the results are invariably born of a joint effort.’ Illustration: Dominic McKenzie

When we think of famous scientists, we think of Albert Einstein, perhaps Marie Curie or Francis Crick. More recently, there’s Peter Higgs, known for the Higgs boson, Andre Geim for graphene or John O’Keefe for his work on the GPS systems in our brains. Though they span vastly different scientific disciplines, they all have one thing in common – they are all Nobel prize winners.

Nobel laureates give a human face to science, a discipline that can often seem anonymous to those who aren’t directly involved. They are great figures in history

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