We brought together working groups and a coordinator and paid for an assistant. Ireland, for example, was not interested in a problem of Scandinavian geology but the interested members down from Scandinavia to Italy contributed the necessary money to make the project work. It depends on the field and the problem. There are many projects that can t be done at all without international cooperation, a lot that can be done bilaterally, many that can be done alone. To begin with, I was convinced we had to cooperate just to keep certain big projects going, because some progress happens only with big jumps.
Diversity is definitely a bonus.
For example, I was coaching some scientists aboard the Glomar Challenger a decade ago. We drilled in the Atlantic and we got the cores. There we were in the ship s lab, with specialists from Moscow, Canada, the U.S. and France, and we were looking at the same core. We had to form a view of what this core represented, what was its environment layer by layer, what was its age, etc. The variety is richer, more exciting, when you have Russians and Americans and French and Germans aboard.