Imagine if scientists cooperated

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/what-if-scientists-didnt-compete/

"What if scientists, instead of rushing to publish or perish, chose to cooperate? Sean Cutler decided to do “a little experiment,” as he calls it, and you can see the results in the forthcoming issue of Science."

I think MRS and MAS researchers cooperate more than researchers in most fields do, because there is so much to be done to make even a single application work. There is also so much "low hanging fruit", that competing hard to be the first to some some particular problem rarely seems worth the effort - just find an interesting unsolved problem that there are not so many people working on.