Build Up Big-Team Science

Are some of science’s biggest questions simply unanswerable without redefining how research is done? This is the question that motivated the researchers who would later establish the ManyBabies Consortium: a grass-roots network of some 450 collaborators from more than 200 institutions who pool resources to complete massive studies on infant development (see, for example, ref. 1). Human infants are perhaps the most powerful learning machines on the planet — and understanding how that learning occurs could inform artificial intelligence, public policy, education and more. Yet a full understanding of infant learning seemed difficult (if not impossible) under the current research model.