As scientists who work in a laboratory at Yale University, my team and I spend our days observing how cells behave to support mammal organ function. 

The outer layer of our skin is constantly renewed by cells that differ in identity and fate. They are distinct and individual. But when scientists look at skin cells under the microscope, we also see their collective performance. 

If some cells are lost, others compensate to maintain cell number and integrity. They do not compete for dominance. They align their behavior toward a shared goal. 

In other words, function is preserved not by irreplaceable units, but by all cell types sharing responsibility.

There’s a lot to be said for this collective participation approach. Yet in academia, we frequently organize around the opposite assumption: that some individuals are indispensable while others are easily replaced or rendered invisible. 

The metrics and frameworks used for promotion or tenure decisions often do not recognize who can have an impact.

When deciding whether to promote or retain someone, we often ask, “If they were hit by a bus, would the field be negatively affected?” 

This so-called deletion test is meant to identify indispensability. 

Similarly, letters of reference speak of candidates as “stars.” Grant and award applications are reviewed with a similar mindset of identifying singular bright lights.

Ironically,  even while searching for the One(s), we often fail to recognize them. 

Katalin Karikó received the Nobel Prize for work that laid the foundation for mRNA vaccines, enabling the rapid development of COVID vaccines. Yet she did not receive tenure, losing her position while performing the very work that later transformed medicine. 

How to Evaluate Scientific Worth?

Karikó’s is not an isolated story but part of a pattern — one that reveals a deeper issue with how institutions attempt to evaluate scientific worth. 

We face two related problems. First, the metrics and frameworks used for promotion or tenure decisions often do not recognize who can have an impact. This oversight is especially true when dominant cultural norms suggest entire groups of people are less competent than others. 

When, for example, a president of a major university or a Nobel Prize laureate says that women as a group are less skilled at math and science and are a distraction in the lab, it is not surprising that highly competent women scientists are ignored. Alice Ball, Katherine Johnson, and Nettie Stevens are only a few of many examples. 

Elevating individual stars above the collective erases the labor, care, mentorship, teaching, and coordination that made their success possible in the first place.

Even putting aside the question of bias, there remains the question of how to define impact. Is it what can be seen immediately? Five years later? Twenty? One hundred? 

Impact unfolds across time and across fields. Our evaluation systems require us to determine a value for contributions whose true impact may not emerge for decades.

Second, even though we rush to credit individual geniuses, any individual contribution is always rooted in collective efforts. We skew towards simplified stories of discovery, ones in which a single individual carries the intellectual weight of an entire field. 

The cost is high: Elevating individual stars above the collective erases the labor, care, mentorship, teaching, and coordination that made their success possible in the first place.

It also makes scientific collaboration less likely for fear of not being recognized as an independent thinker — even though scientific advances require collaborations both within and across fields. 

Simple stories of discovery push us toward an impossible ideal: to be the one, the hero, the Nobel laureate.

Individuality and Collectivity Are Not Opposites

Some institutions have begun to acknowledge these limitations. Initiatives such as narrative CVs, team-science evaluation frameworks, and broader recognition of mentorship, collaboration, and open science are attempts to widen how contribution is assessed. But these efforts are in the early stages and uneven. 

The irony is that many scientists on the committees that determine tenure, evaluate grants, and bestow awards already understand the richness of differential contributions. Like me, they know that biology itself does not frame individuality and collectivity as opposites. Tissues survive stress, injury, and change because they are adaptable and redundant. They do not rely on singular saviors.

What if we designed our departments, promotion criteria, and review processes to recognize interdependence rather than exceptional isolation? 

If scientific discovery, like the scientific bodies we study, is collective, then our evaluation systems should reflect that reality. Promotion and review processes should reward one’s sustained contributions to shared intellectual ecosystems. 

They should ask if someone builds collaborations, enables others’ discoveries, mentors the next generation, and creates conditions where new ideas can emerge. And then they should promote, in substantial and concrete ways, these contributions. 

Unfortunately, most institutions dismiss these qualities under the label of “service,” preferring instead examples of time spent exclusively advancing one’s own projects and highlighting one’s individual accomplishments.

We end up rewarding the self-forward candidate when their success could not have happened without the service-forward kind. 

My own professional visibility is inseparable from the contributions of a large group of others, yet too often my team’s accomplishments are reported as my individual success. This dynamic permeates many routine practices of my academic life. When I am invited to give a talk, for example, I am aware that each choice I make can reinforce a narrative in which a single individual appears central, even when the contributions are the product of many minds and conditions. 

I have also observed my own language shifting to “I” rather than “we” when I feel particularly vulnerable before an academic audience, a sign of how academia’s usual reward system has programmed my own behavior. 

To be sure, I am not calling for less individuality. We simply need systems in which individuals can matter without having to be superior and without stripping from the narrative the additional minds and conditions that allow for boundary-pushing contributions. We owe future generations fair promotion and evaluation systems, and we must support those who continue to create the conditions for groups to work. 

If our tissues — the oldest and most evolved living system — can survive, grow, adapt and create without singular stars, perhaps our academic institutions can too.

What if we judged worth not by imagined irreplaceability, but by sustained contribution to the whole? What if we designed our departments, promotion criteria, and review processes to recognize interdependence rather than exceptional isolation? 

If we took collaboration seriously, we might choose effective groups to lead initiatives; we might reward group efforts and create group awards. 

I recall the first time the International Society of Stem Cell Research experimented with a group award that honored individuals serving on various ISSCR committees. I felt palpable energy from many of the recipients, whether the individual was already well-known or not. and a deep appreciation for what they had done together. 

If our tissues — the oldest and most evolved living system — can survive, grow, adapt and create without singular stars, perhaps our academic institutions can too.