Non-scientists often have a mental image of scientists, and the scientific process, as being dispassionate and emotionless. Think about how scientists are often depicted in movies -- cool, methodical, and impassive, sometimes to the point of seeming inhuman. (Other than those characters who are mad scientists, of course, but I wouldn't argue that those characterizations are any more accurate.)
In reality, scientists are human, and therefore subject to the same range of emotions we all are. It's to be hoped that their rational faculties are better developed than the rest of us; certainly, their specialist knowledge had better be. But otherwise, the personalities of scientists run the same gamut as any random sample of humanity -- to take an example from the field of genetics, compare the humble, self-effacing, genial Svante Pääbo to the bombastic wild child Kary Mullis.
The result is that inevitably, scientists' personalities come through in their work -- and, sometimes, get in the way, especially when you have two incompatible types working on the same goal. And the best example of this I can think of is the long-running feud between nineteenth-century paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
Marsh and Cope were working in a fruitful time and place for fossil hunters; the late 1800s in the North American Midwest, particularly Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, which have rich sedimentary deposits from the Jurassic, Cretaceous Periods, and early Paleogene Periods. They started out -- well, if not friends, at least on reasonably amicable terms, but they were set up to fall out. Marsh was from a working-class family in Lockport, New York, not far from where I live now. Cope, on the other hand, was solidly upper crust, from a family that had been in Philadelphia for two hundred years. "The patrician Edward considered Marsh not quite a gentleman," observed a mutual friend. "The academic Othniel regarded Cope as not quite a professional."
They did share one set of characteristics, though, and that was being pugnacious, quarrelsome, and distrustful.
The first salvo in what were to become known as the Bone Wars happened before they left the east. Cope had been working a marl deposit (a calcareous clay often associated with freshwater deposition), and Marsh found out that he'd discovered some decent fossils -- so Marsh went to the pit excavators and bribed them to send any future finds to him rather than to Cope. Cope retaliated with a similar incursion into sites Marsh had laid claim to. But things really went downhill when Marsh published a sarcasm-laden response to a paper Cope had written on the recently-discovered plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, in which he'd reconstructed the skeleton with the head on the wrong end.
Cope tried to buy up every copy of the journal that had the error he could find, as well as the one with the rebuttal. You can guess how well that worked. Marsh responded by laughingly doing everything he could do to publicize it further. Cope had blundered, there was no doubt about it, but Marsh's sneering riposte effectively detonated any remaining friendship the two had.
Things got worse in 1872 when both men went to Wyoming to prospect in some Eocene-age fossil beds that proved to have a variety of then-unknown species of mammals, including Uintatherium, Loxolophodon, Eobasileus, Dinoceras, and Tinoceras. Not only did they each trick the other into hiring workers who were loyal to the rival, they engaged in the biggest slap in the face you can give a taxonomist; renaming a species that had already been found and described by someone else. Marsh accused Cope of deliberately and knowingly misidentifying fossils as being new discoveries when they weren't, but backdating their discovery dates to make it look like he had precedence.
In the naming issue, at least, it seems like Marsh had a point. Once the dust settled, a lot of Marsh's identifications have stuck, and only a few of Cope's have. For example, Marsh gave names to four of the most iconic dinosaur species known -- Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus.
Things really went downhill when Marsh started paying locals to prospect for him -- by 1877 he had not only hired dozens of people, but was paying them to keep their finds (and the locales) secret so Cope's spies wouldn't get wind of them. Cope retaliated with similar tactics, which led to a number of attempts by workmen to feed partial or inaccurate information to their bosses because the other team had bribed them to hamper efforts in any way they could.
In one case, this devolved into an actual fight, with the rival teams throwing rocks at each other.
Ultimately, though, this kind of behavior is never sustainable. Other scientists, such as Alexander Emmanuel Agassiz, decided that someone had to be the adult in the room, and got their own teams together to go investigate the fossil sites on their own. The Bone Wars had produced a huge amount of fossil material, much of which is still in museums today; but in the process it destroyed both men's reputations, and financially ruined them. Cope and Marsh died virtually penniless in 1897 and 1899, respectively, and hated each other right to the bitter end.
What strikes me about all this is that what you had was two men who were both motivated by a fascination for, and a love of, paleontology, but they let their rivalry rob thirty years of work of every last scrap of joy. It may seem like a quaint story, a century and a half later, but really, it's more a tragedy than a comedy. Scientists are frequently competitive; in fact, in today's publish-or-perish environment, it's nearly a necessity. But Marsh and Cope turned a competition into an all-out war, and in the end, both of them lost.
So scientists are capable of the same range of behaviors we all are -- from nobility all the way down to toddlerish pettiness. They don't leave their personalities behind when they go into research. Sometimes this can be a good thing; the puckish senses of humor found in brilliant researchers like Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are legendary.
But in the case of the Bone Wars, it resulted in three decades of misery that could so easily have been avoided had they just been able to set aside their desperation to be in first place every single time.
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