The Challenge of Teamwork-Esmeralda R.

While reading chapter 9, “The Challenge of Precision Medicine”, from the book Rigor Mortis, I was very astonished with everything that was occurring in the crisis with biomedical research. Medicine and cures are still not found due to scientists lack of partnership. Each give their own opinions instead of collaborating to put all opinions and ideas together and agree with one another to come up with solutions and positive results. As stated by Barker, “Everybody wants to do their own thing.”(page 202). I believe that findings won’t be found as much or faster if  teamwork isn’t present.The greed and ego exists in the labs where work is being done, and that should be put to the side. “We wasted our time on defending our position and point of view instead of working together to make it better”(page 207)says Haibe-kains. His realization as a scientist gives it more of a reason to be aware that the way of working should change. Findings will be found much faster and will have better results once effort is put into it, working not as an individual, but as a team.

As I read a little more, I realized how money is being wasted on nothing. No cures, treatments, findings are done. Why should scientists be given grants? In my opinion, I believe that grants should be given once they discover something useful that will be helpful for our human race. There wouldn’t be anything to lose, in the end, we would all get a win-win. My curiosity grew with this topic so I decided to research a little more upon it. In an article I read, Forbes, it tells how research has shown that biomedical research is a “waste” of time. Their way of seeing it as a “waste” of time is understanding, once Janet Woodcock says,”The biomedical research community believes if you publish a paper on a biomarker, then it’s real. And most of them are wrong. They aren’t predictive, or they don’t add additional value. They’re just plain old wrong.”(page 211) This shows how close we rely to information that isn’t even true. Does believing and relying on “research” count as a waste of time and money as well? Many papers have been  published on osteoarthritis biomarkers with no correlative science going on. This shows how lately, biomarkers have been a failure.Drugs received have been worthless and also had side effects. Scientists even admit that they’re facing a “dead end”. The solution to this severe problem is to make simple changes even though its not an easy call to go back and start over with different procedures but at least we would be given meaningful and satisfying data.This could all be accomplished with teamwork.