What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped

I think perspective matters here somewhat. If you're scooped as an established scientist, it is a kind of validation of the importance of your work. If you're scooped as a graduate student or post-doc, it can be a disheartening loss of credit for years of work. The difference is the PI gets credit (rightly so) for the direction of the research, which is validated by being scooped, while the graduate student or post-doc is blamed for the speed of the work.

The main reason that scientists' responses to this has changed over the years is the shrinkage of resources (against the number of scientists). In a field with many interesting problems to work on, lots of research funding and many tenure track positions, the loss of one result will affect you much less -- especially if you're already famous and established.

However, the situation today is much more cut-throat!

My old lab which I left two years ago suddenly sent me some manuscripts to review a few weeks ago so that we can quickly publish a paper that my professor has been sitting on. This era is far different from the 50s and 60s, it is now a publish and perish era. Scooping is a threat to your career.

Also, side note, Sydney Brenner is quite famous also for developing C. elegans as a model animal system. Open worm is a result of the tremendous amount of research done on that animal.

If you are solely motivated by scientific curiosity then it doesn't matter to you whether you get the answer first or someone else does. In reality, most people's motivations are not so pure.

I don't know if I could be that selfless and humble and just happy for the greater good. I hope I would be, but can't say for certain.