Science magazine today reports another ego trip.

A U.S. company [454] has begun to trickle out information on a unique DNA study it calls “Project Jim,” a crash effort to sequence the entire genome of a single individual. The results are likely to be made public this summer. Anonymity is out of the question: It has already been announced that the genome belongs to James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize and co-discoverer of DNA’s structure. Watson won’t be alone: Harvard Medical School has approved a plan by computational geneticist George Church to sequence and make public the genomes of well-informed volunteers—including his own. And J. Craig Venter says his nonprofit institute will soon release a complete version of his genome.

My daily newsletter says that Roche is going to acquire 454 for $155M and plans to use the sequencer for IVD applications, I hope they will forget “Project Jim” somewhere on a harddisk.

.. another thoughtful essay by Sean Eddy in PLOS Computational Biology cites the NIH Roadmap Initiative

The scale and complexity of today’s biomedical research problems demand that scientists move beyond the confines of their individual disciplines and explore new organizational models for team science. Advances in molecular imaging, for example, require collaborations among diverse groups—radiologists, cell biologists, physicists, and computer programmers.

which sounds great like all interdisciplinary science but has also all the drawbacks (“to temper the wind to the shorn lamb” seems to be the English translation of the German “weakest ring of the chain”).

Progress is driven by new scientific questions, which demand new ways of thinking. You want to go where a question takes you, not where your training left you.

Sure, the game is more about interdisciplinary people than interdisciplinary teams

A motley crew of misfits

and not EU accountants drive progress.

(in US dollars) asks Pimm – the partial immortalization blog. A first response to this question -based on Google adsense revenues- is about $0.47/post. I think that prices depend on context – from negative balance (wasted time) to a new research direction (+tenure +$100,000) there is everything possible.