Moneyball: Why Sage?

I started my postdoctoral appointment at Sage Bionetworks on Martin Luther King day, 2012.  As I write this, I've been at Sage for two weeks.  It's become abundantly clear that I made the right choice.  I love it here, and the work we're doing will revolutionize science at the very least, and at most lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

Last night's team-building activity was to watch Moneyball.  In the movie, Billy Beane, the general manager for the lowest-budget team in the league, aspires to win the championship in spite of the odds against him.  His attempt involves changing the game itself:  challenging conventional wisdom and turning instead to a whole new way of playing baseball.  Nobody else thinks it'll work, from his own managers to the media.  I won't ruin the movie for you, because the parallels to Sage are already there.  We're not a major pharmaceutical company looking for the next blockbuster drug, or a big-name university looking for our next Nature paper.  We do have world-class leadership, scientists and engineers.  We're a non-profit with a profound vision: we want to take big data and turn it into big understanding, and to do that we need to change how science is done.

So what's wrong with science?

Take a look at a scientific paper published 50 years ago.  Then, it was unusual to have a paper with more than three authors.  The data sets tended to be of manageable size, and the analysis tended to be simple and relatively easy to duplicate by other labs.  Research was published in traditional print journals, and the journals were then sold to university libraries. 

If you look at a scientific paper from today, on the other hand, it would be unremarkable to have a dozen authors, each with their own contributions.  The data sets are much larger, and probably more difficult to obtain and reproduce.  The statistical analysis may be so complicated that few outside the research group itself actually understand what was done.  Research is published online, but is frequently behind a pay-wall.

To make matters worse, the publishing industry is trying to make it even harder and more expensive to access taxpayer-funded research.  This isn't just greedy.  It's amoral.  In the biotech industry, to lock down research the name of personal gain may well be costing people who need that treatment their lives. 

Our Synapse platform will standardize data access, allow for portable statistical analyses, and ultimately help researchers across fields--from theorists to the clinic--collaborate, verify, share results and make faster progress.  It will promote open research by allowing scientists to earn more citations and exposure through modular work-flows.  When Synapse is deployed, it will be free for the greater scientific community to use and extend. 

This platform will change how bioinformatics is done in the same way that the open source model changed how we think about software.  Nobody would have guessed that a volunteer force would work on a software project and end up with such a wonderful product as Linux.  Scientists are halfway there:  we've been giving away our life's work for free for hundreds of years.  Now we just need a better way to work together.