Collaboration: how labouring together gets you further

Collaboration is an odd word, meaning both traitorous co-operation with an enemy and working together to create something better. It comes from the Latin collaborare (col means together and laborare means to labour).

Over the ages we’ve been encouraged to labour together for the benefit of society:

“It is the long history of humankind…that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” — Charles Darwin

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller

This pandemic seems to be giving us an opportunity to work with our “enemies” to create something better. Matt Apuzzo and David D. Kirkpatrick wrote about just this in The New York Times: “While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history.”

It is taking a global effort to solve this problem. Vaccine researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) are working with The Pasteur Institute (Paris) and Themis Bioscience (Austria). The consortium was funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (Norway), financed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (USA) and The Serum Institute (India).

Apuzzo and Kirkpatrick note that, “Never before… have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency.”