9 October is John Lennon’s birthday, so today he would have been 83 years old. I’ve often heard people refer to his most famous song – Imagine – as a naive hippy dippy vision of utopia that only a wealthy person removed from real life could come up with.

And it is sometimes difficult to square the ideals put forward in that song with what we see happening around us.

Within the world of clinical trials, there’s a lot of talk about working together and everyone moving forward with the same goals and motivations. But again it’s not always all that easy to detect this kind of behavior in the wild.

Like myself, though, there are plenty of people who believe that coming together and collaborating with common purpose is the most effective approach we can adopt.

And if you work in clinical research, I hope that some day you’ll join us and help make the vision a reality.