If you want them to collaborate, you should let them collaborate

To reinvigorate the field and avoid repeating past problems, more exchange should be fostered between basic and clinical scientists. When spinal-cord researchers began organizing retreats and workshops to bring together basic researchers and clinicians, they saw first-hand how little each side knows about how the other works. The mutual lack of knowledge was huge; each side had completely different language to describe the same scenario.

But this is exactly what the drug companies should have been doing, putting the basic and clinical scientists under one roof. It's lamentable that they need to have special retreats for bringing these folks together. The reason why this part jumped out at me was because I have just started reading Jon Gertner's great new book about Bell Labs. Many reasons contributed to the institution's phenomenal success, but one notable factor was the concentration of the purest and the most applied scientists under one roof. The firm's pioneering research director Mervin Kelly carefully planned the physical layout of the lab so that everyone, irrespective of specialty or research level, was a stone's throw from everyone else. That way even the purest mathematician was forced to interact and learn from the most hands-on engineer. Research and manufacturing were geographically indistinguishable. As the photo above shows, there was a very long seven-hundred foot corridor with open offices and labs on each side. It was impossible to walk down the hall and not learn something from someone working in a very different field.