Teamwork is very important in our lives. Infection-control teams do their best to prevent us from encountering dangerous pathogens in hospitals (see p. 37). If pathogens do get into our bodies, we have teams of phagocytes that can engulf bacterial invaders by endocytosis (see pp. 38–41). For us to acquire immunity to pathogens we employ ‘custom-made’ teams of B and T cells (see pp. 30–34). And we could not live without the teams of insects that pollinate our crops and recycle the nutrients in waste and dead materials (see pp. 22–25).
The biological sciences also rely heavily on teamwork. James Watson once said, ‘Formula for breakthroughs in research: take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.’ That certainly worked for him — he was only 25 when his team (including Francis Crick) discovered the structure of DNA. In 1953 they published their results in the journal Nature, which remains the place to get the full details behind important biological breakthroughs.
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