How research goes viral
Scores of interesting new findings from the biosciences may speed around the globe at the click of a mouse, but one thing particularly encourages other researchers to follow up on them: The chance to use the lab materials upon which studies are based. Indeed, a recent paper co-authored by MIT economist Scott Stern shows that making the physical materials used in lab experiments — such as cell lines, microorganisms or recombinant DNA — available to other scientists can vastly increase the rate at which knowledge flows through the scientific community, as measured by the amount of citations that papers receive. After all, biologists want to replicate the results they have read about — and verify them, if need be. From the 1960s through the 1990s, dozens of supposedly different cell lines were contaminated by HeLa cells, which originated...