A research and writing experiment

Besides posting news and occasional thoughts, this blog is also conceived as an experiment in on-line writing.

A couple of months ago I decided to write a small book on "Individuality in biomedicine" -- and now I've found out that I want to do it in the public sphere. In other words, I will try to develop the manuscript on-line by posting new ideas, readings, successive changes in the argument and chunks of text here.

I'm not intending to be too honest: I will probably spare you too many unfinished fragments and stupidities. This is not going to be warts and all. On the other hand I will really do my best to post text, ideas, questions etc. regularly as the book develops.

Some of my colleagues have told me they would never want to do anything like this, because they are afraid of being scooped if they share before 'real' publication. I see the point -- in some areas competition is indeed high, which means that you risk seeing your ideas ending up in someone else's book or paper before you get them out in print.

But this field (I will try to explain what I mean by "Representation of individuality" in later posts) is almost empty, as far as I know. As things stands now, the hope of finding someone out there to share ideas with trumps my anxiety of having my (probably not very original) ideas stolen.

I don't know if this is going to work or not, but I'm ready to give it a try. You are very welcome to comment, both on the substantive content of individual posts and on the experiment as such.