These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job.
The really concerning potential consequence of this is that it could result in a dearth of innovation in cures for diseases, and we won't see the affect of losses until 5 or 10 years down the road. No one will fund a biotech startup that's not backed by MDs or PhDs and academia-approved proof-of-concept results. Good luck getting that when everyone is running for the lifeboats.
> I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job.
Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances.
Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc.
A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
After my Ph.D., I went to a startup doing biofuels (Joule Unlimited), and then came back to academia to do a postdoc, and again it was difficult to decide between industry and academia. In the end, I chose to stay in academia because many of my goals in biotech will require a lot of fundamental research before they are able to attract angel/venture funding.
As a new assistant professor (as of two months ago), I do have to apply for lots of grants, but in the end, the funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless (got our first grant last week). It does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects that can produce results in the near-ish term (2-3 years) and apply technologies we are developing for the larger end-goals to problems in human health and disease. I think that's a fair tradeoff for now. I think we will be able to do the longer-term projects more slowly on the side as well as interface with startups and companies to attack commercial problems where it makes sense.
The problems we face today are because we hit a steady-state in funding, rather than continuing to grow as we've done over previous decades. One can argue we should continue to grow, but at some point we are going to hit a steady-state again and the situation will be the same. There are many interesting proposals on how best to reach a better structure for steady-state funding, but in the end, hard decisions like the one the OP made are going to continue being just that; hard decisions. I think the positive of the whole thing is that there are other options that grad students/post-docs can now consider in biology that aren't a tenure-track position, and that overall is a good thing.
Absolutely correct. The beauty of capitalism is that it is a blind mouse running through a maze. We won't know what the impacts of a decline in research funding will be, but there's only one way to find out! Will it be another Dark Age? Or will it be Galt's Gluch? Stay tuned!
Inspected rationally, this sort of national gamble is the definition of insanity. It wasn't "American Exceptionalism" that made the U.S.A what it is, but an unprecedented leve of concerted investment by the state into science and technology over the past century.
Let's see where this grand experiment leads us.
Relevant HN post from earlier, where I elaborate on this issue further:
i wish it was just the money. when i went into the university i was hoping to find people like me. it attracts bright minds, but it doesn't encourage them in any sort of way. a bright mind in that system is worth "almost" the same as the average joe who studied enough to pass through the system. so we're there, scattered, with no means to find each other. some of them do so anyway, it's what keeps them put up with the rest of the bs. some of them end up like me, pretty much alone, and then eventually lose interest.
i'm not saying the average joe shouldn't get into the university, i'm not even saying the others should get preferential treatment, but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyway? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time. you take away time that could be used to teach the less gifted. you fill a spot which is valuable in the beginning, at the end not so much, because most will have dropped out by then.
i believe that we need to get away from the notion that everyone should study exactly the same. i don't see how it makes sense at all. and the same goes for phd's. which is essentially a pretty static period of underpaid work.
Are you sure it's feudalism? It seems to me that the problem is in the modern management methods and always expecting results and publications, and tying finance to that, which is very shortsighted. But maybe you could explain better what you mean and what's more feudal about current system than what it always had been.
Here's the open question... If people are really forced to work on 2 year time horizons, should this investment really be happening in the private sector rather than the government? I get the idea of funding basic science with 20+ year time horizons to benefit humanity, but tactical solutions?
Separately - is this an issue with just new scientists, or existing ones too? The useful data would be "Total NIH funding" and "Per scientist funding." My anecdotal (and quite possibly unrepresentative!) data is that the total pie is staying the same size, but going to a set of existing researchers in a "Winner Takes All" manner. It's not conducive to new independent researchers, but perhaps we are creating too many for a fixed pie of research money.
Alternatively, should tuition be funding research if we are now in the business of producing researchers for the private sector?
It just seems to me that long term science as a group of scientists begging for government funding is no longer sustainable.
It sounds like when the free market competes with the NIH for talent, the NIH wins. Perhaps the slowdown in NIH growth can incent folks with that skillset to go into medicine.
The need for innovation exists regardless of whether there are researchers working in the publicly-funded sector. And, let's face it, much of the research coming out is the result of 'publish or perish' rather than genuine curiosity.
Many great things in the past came from private research. Today's technology companies will probably be forced to invest more in their in-house research rather than acquiring competitors at sky-high prices.
It's worth noting that this guy is running a kickstarter campaign re: "A free, up-to-date, crowdsourced protocol repository for the life sciences". If we are sending tons of traffic his way, maybe we should send some to his kickstarter too.
I quit my second postdoc to launch a nonprofit research institute (we did not get funding, and are retrying later this year). I currently drive for lyft - and make more money than I did as a postdoc, with far fewer hours and better working conditions. This makes economic sense; it's not clear to me that what I was doing as a scientist was really doing society any good, at least as a late night driver I'm 1) giving people what they want and 2) keeping drunk people off the streets (a social good).
My Academic path has been tortured; graduated from a really good undergrad, went to an even better grad school (my cohort is basically placed as faculty at places like Berkeley, Stanford, UCSD, TSRI, etc). But in grad school I lost time cleaning up after an irresponsible grad student (who, btw, is faculty at UW) and only published two papers that aren't flashy but are solid, and in second-tier journals. Did an amazing first postdoc actually possibly helping the world (pushing forward a drug candidate), at a third-tier school - since due to the economic collapse, was hard to get a job/good position in 2009. One publication, second-tier journal. Did a more amazing second "postdoc" (actually hired as a BS biologist, via craigslist) under a nobel laureate, at an institution where publishing isn't a priority, and the resources available are somewhat orthogonal to doing the comprehensive set of experiments necessary to get a cell/nature/science paper. My efforts resulted in improving an enzyme - three times (there are very few people who can claim to have done that even once), again, second-tier journals (two are papers-in-work, even though I've quit, i'm still going over there to get them written up). I'm not really ever going to get a faculty position (tried, two years running). I see crappier postdocs and grad students get their run, but you know what? I don't care anymore.
One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-minded people to have good lab-meeting style discussions about how to tackle a project. Industry positions can be pretty attractive.
I spent the better part of a decade doing academic research, and now have spent the better part of a decade doing startups and software. If I could choose to do anything while also being assured of a stable living, I'd do the research again.
The thing about the software industry is that "interesting" tends to be defined down -- for example, you'll be working on a CRUD app, but the "interesting" part is that you're doing it "at scale". Or you'll be doing some "interesting" refactor of a hard piece of software, that isn't interesting in any other way. Or most insidious of all...there's nothing really "interesting" in your job, and you just get inured to the day-to-day nature of the work, which always tends to look the same. The difference is in the big picture, and for most software jobs, the big picture just drains your soul.
I'm pretty lucky in that the project I'm working on now has a truly "interesting" technical component, but it still doesn't compare with the idea that I could be working on an interesting technical problem that also might lead to a new antibiotic or vaccine...or just discovering something new. I miss that part.
I'm currently in the middle of a PhD, and you've touched on the exact fear I have. I intend on finding a job in industry after I graduate, and the biggest fear I have is a restriction on freedom. I totally get that there are jobs out there that still give you some amount of freedom to pick your own tools and/or approach a problem in your own way.
Every now and then, I casually leaf through job ads and I have no idea how to tell which are which. I think that's what scares me. I get this feeling that when it comes time to join industry, it's just going to be a crapshoot---maybe I'll get lucky and maybe I won't.
(Note that this isn't a criticism lodged in comparison to academia. I've already made up my mind that I'll be leaving once I graduate.)
It depends what you want out of it, but the thing keeping me from going to industry is that none of the people I know who've made the transition are allowed to publish most of the interesting stuff they do. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to write a blog post, publish a detailed technical paper, publish a high-level overview paper, or anything else.
I know there are places that are more open-minded towards publishing your results in the open literature, but the majority of companies seem to put roadblocks in the way. I know some people who have done very interesting work (one at Exxon, for example) and will never be allowed to talk publicly about it, because it's their company's trade secret now.
Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale is that mid-career scientists will bring larger and more research grants (and will do so faster after arriving) than junior scientists. Essentially, let someone else take on the "risk" of the new faculty members and we poach the proven ones.
It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia.
PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
Most are making 5x to 7x? If we estimate that a professor in a low-paid field makes maybe $60k (ignoring the possibility of grants to pay for additional salary during the summer) this would mean most of your high school friends are now making $300k to $420k. It's rare that most of a high school or college's students go on to become 1 percenters.
That seems like an unusually low salary, then. Let's pick a major public research university in the US and a department, say Physics UT Austin (feel free to play the same game with data from another public and another department, like CS at UC Berkeley). Browsing through professor salaries [1], by the time Professors hit tenure they are approaching or breaking 100K a year. Five to seven times this is 500-700K a year!
This is a really thoughtful post highlighting many of the deeply-rooted problems in securing funding as an early-stage academic. It's depressing for bright young scientists to be looking forward to lives as assistant professors submitting grant after grant with an expected ~10% success rate.
But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists.
Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
At least with a start-up your fate is much much, much, more in your own hands. It's really pretty astounding nowadays how many grants get rejected over the the tiniest things. I just had an application rejected (with high marks) due to it (1) focusing too heavily on what the call for applications primarily asked for, and (2) not numbering the pages.
It isn't just that research funds are drying up. There's also a growing number of Ph.D.s fighting over the shrinking pot of money [0]. I usually advise students not to pursue a Ph.D. because the life of the median academic is pretty awful. But at the same time the general job market for new grads (in most fields) isn't all that great either, meaning that in relative terms the Ph.D. route hasn't fallen too far in the rankings of post-graduate plans.
Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip.
And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
I've left academia and returned, then left and am returning again. Thanks to the sequester, the NIH and NSF funding situation is bleak--I know successful PIs who currently have zilch. They're pursuing consulting contracts to make ends meet--at least in engineering this is possible. At this point it is trolling--pure sadism--to suggest that confidence and hard work will overcome the destructively competitive working conditions many academics look forward to every day. (I suppose I could be confident, for an additional charge.) Why is it trolling? Because the troll will never ever acknowledge his expectation that scientists (and science along with them) should thrive in a plutocracy as if it were a meritocracy [cf. Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162]
I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes.
The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)
On the one hand, it is sad that good, forward-looking academics are being denied funding.
On the other hand, during my time as a PhD student doing research for a top tier university, I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all.
I think the existing academic model is unfair to both professors and especially to undergraduate student. Allowing the very top professors to focus on research, while making the rest take teaching seriously could remedy the situation.
> I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all.
Research has to happen somewhere. Where research happens, there will always be bunk projects. Some will fail despite good intentions, some due to negligence.
Given that there will always be some waste, you can do a lot worse than putting the $ towards academia. The alternative being a research institution, where researchers are paid actual living wages.
There are pros and cons to both models, but academia is undeniably cheaper. Thus, the cost of failure is lower. I didn't mention the third alternative, which is to remove public funding from research altogether. I don't think this is a good idea.
There's already a tax on that $18 billion, it's at least a capital gains tax of 20% (not to mention the income taxes on all the attorney's, accountants, etc... involved in the deal). You just need to fix the allocation of the tax dollars.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in < 1k LoC. Bootstrap? give me a break.
It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their own html site has just progressed technology.
>Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors
Welcome to the party, comrade! Want a beer?
(No, seriously, it's not bad being a socialist. Turn off the American anti-applause-lights that are designed to make us look eeeeeeviiiiil and examine what our actual positions are. We're an ideology like more-or-less any other, with plenty of valid points even outsiders acknowledge.)
Funding science with taxes raised by income tax is socialist for me. Economic theory shows that income tax is the least distortionary kind of tax,
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
How do you suppose that $1b would be allocated? Of course it will go to the top 1% of researchers, so the established top will stay at the top. Your proposal will make matter worse in exactly the way that "SOCIALISM" (OP's scare words) doesn't work.
My brother is leaving industry and going into the ivory tower later this year. He says that it's not just the DoD or the academy, its all government funding. He says the PhD is like a union card now. Lockheed just fired 4000 people[0] and NASA's average age is about 53 [1]. The entire DoD is aging and about to retire, with no-one in the 25-50 year old range, effectively. You'd think that they would then start hiring people in those age brackets, but no. It seems that the idea is to just let government funding die a slow death, that or transition to drones somehow. Its increasingly likely that the good jobs are going to be from private funding due to decreased tax revenue. We can see this in the Valley right now. This means you gotta know people to get the work, not just be 'good.'
Many of the recent 'goodbye acadaemia' that I've come across seem to be from people in molecular biology, which has a reputation for being a particularly competitive field for funding. I wonder whether academics in other fields are dropping out at a similar rate..?
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.
This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis.
I turned down an opportunity to do a really interesting Ph.D in machine learning / biologically-inspired computation because I wasn't either willing or able to take the vow of poverty required. Since then I've consistently made many times what most scientists make doing programming and even IT work that is far below my abilities.
Basic research is economically worthless-- you can't patent a concept or a law of nature, nor can you sell understanding of nature's principles to anyone. The transistor may be worth billions, but the understanding that enabled the transistor is worth $0 as there is no way to monetize it.
The economic worth of scientific understanding seems to obey an extreme hockey-stick graph: it is worthless until it nears the instant of delivering a marketable technology, at which point it skyrockets. As a result, the market only rewards the last few people in a very long line of innovation that began with basic principles. Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions. How much is Tim Berners-Lee worth? How about the communications theorists before him that pioneered the idea of hypertext? (Do we even know who they were?) ... and so on, with each step back in time being worth exponentially less.
How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)?
How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)?
How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)?
How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love it.
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
I made lemonade from the lemons: came out of an MIT postdoc with a Science paper, the academic track didn't pan out (2 application cycles) but I saw that there was a need for a great online organic chemistry resource, so I started building one. 4 years in, it's self-supporting, and I have many of the advantages of an instructor with very little of the red tape I'd be experiencing if I were teaching in academia. Miss the research sometimes, but I'm sure someone would accept me as a visiting researcher for a year if I ever wanted to get back into it.
However, one aspect of being a professor has been terrifying me for over five years now – the uncertainty of getting funding from NIH. No let me rephrase that. What is terrifying is the near-certainty that any grant I submit would be rejected. I have been waiting for the funding situation to improve, but it seems to only be getting worse. I personally know about ten scientists who have become professors in the last 3-4 years. Not a single one of them has been able to get a grant proposal funded; just rejection, after rejection, after rejection. One of these is a brilliant young professor who has applied for grants thirteen times and has been rejected consistently, despite glowing reviews and high marks for innovation. She is on the brink of losing her lab as her startup funds are running out and the prospect of this has literally led to sleepless nights and the need for sleeping pills. How can this not terrify me?
Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Isn't this what endowmnets and tuition is for? Imaginge of google or GE hired people and forced them to raise money from the federal government to actually build their next project? Notwithstanding the mis-appropriation of the profits, purely from a managerial perspective this is highly flawed.
The flipside is also true, Universities are sturctured to leverage outside capital rather than their own (despite having gobs of it). MIT has $11B in the bank, they are not desperate for cash. To do "science", or otherwise.
There are several alternatives to the current funding giants, and I think they'll offer superior returns. If they do, NIH and others will change.
My favorite example:
Janelia Farm - I believe they expect 50% of their projects to fail.
A Janelia recruitment excerpt is illustrative (and you don't have to have done a post-doc even to lead a lab):
"We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, neurobiologists and physicists who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research.
All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants. Scientists at Janelia have no formal teaching duties and minimal administrative responsibilities. Janelia labs are small groups of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians tackling challenging research problems that are expected to have transformative impact. Group leaders are expected to engage in the direct conduct of research in a highly interactive and collaborative environment."
It's not the only way - and I doubt Janelia thinks it should be - but this style could be good for science in general. Even if funding levels return, I think they should probably return in a different form. Janelia might offer a blueprint for that.
It's not just the US, it's internationally. Last time I was interviewed for an academic position the interview feedback I got made no sense whatsoever. A different (ivy league) position doing some really interesting work fell through for bureaucratic reasons around the same time. It was around that time that I FYIQ'ed myself.
If you're technically minded, open source software developer provides many of the good things about academic work without many of the downsides.
[+] [-] naterator|12 years ago|reply
The really concerning potential consequence of this is that it could result in a dearth of innovation in cures for diseases, and we won't see the affect of losses until 5 or 10 years down the road. No one will fund a biotech startup that's not backed by MDs or PhDs and academia-approved proof-of-concept results. Good luck getting that when everyone is running for the lifeboats.
[+] [-] shas3|12 years ago|reply
Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances.
Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc.
A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
[+] [-] skosuri|12 years ago|reply
As a new assistant professor (as of two months ago), I do have to apply for lots of grants, but in the end, the funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless (got our first grant last week). It does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects that can produce results in the near-ish term (2-3 years) and apply technologies we are developing for the larger end-goals to problems in human health and disease. I think that's a fair tradeoff for now. I think we will be able to do the longer-term projects more slowly on the side as well as interface with startups and companies to attack commercial problems where it makes sense.
The problems we face today are because we hit a steady-state in funding, rather than continuing to grow as we've done over previous decades. One can argue we should continue to grow, but at some point we are going to hit a steady-state again and the situation will be the same. There are many interesting proposals on how best to reach a better structure for steady-state funding, but in the end, hard decisions like the one the OP made are going to continue being just that; hard decisions. I think the positive of the whole thing is that there are other options that grad students/post-docs can now consider in biology that aren't a tenure-track position, and that overall is a good thing.
[+] [-] FD3SA|12 years ago|reply
Inspected rationally, this sort of national gamble is the definition of insanity. It wasn't "American Exceptionalism" that made the U.S.A what it is, but an unprecedented leve of concerted investment by the state into science and technology over the past century.
Let's see where this grand experiment leads us.
Relevant HN post from earlier, where I elaborate on this issue further:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7321660
[+] [-] rjzzleep|12 years ago|reply
i'm not saying the average joe shouldn't get into the university, i'm not even saying the others should get preferential treatment, but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyway? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time. you take away time that could be used to teach the less gifted. you fill a spot which is valuable in the beginning, at the end not so much, because most will have dropped out by then.
i believe that we need to get away from the notion that everyone should study exactly the same. i don't see how it makes sense at all. and the same goes for phd's. which is essentially a pretty static period of underpaid work.
but that would take effort wouldn't it?
[+] [-] asgard1024|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
Separately - is this an issue with just new scientists, or existing ones too? The useful data would be "Total NIH funding" and "Per scientist funding." My anecdotal (and quite possibly unrepresentative!) data is that the total pie is staying the same size, but going to a set of existing researchers in a "Winner Takes All" manner. It's not conducive to new independent researchers, but perhaps we are creating too many for a fixed pie of research money.
Alternatively, should tuition be funding research if we are now in the business of producing researchers for the private sector?
It just seems to me that long term science as a group of scientists begging for government funding is no longer sustainable.
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/04/americas-pa...
It sounds like when the free market competes with the NIH for talent, the NIH wins. Perhaps the slowdown in NIH growth can incent folks with that skillset to go into medicine.
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
Many great things in the past came from private research. Today's technology companies will probably be forced to invest more in their in-house research rather than acquiring competitors at sky-high prices.
[+] [-] newaccountfool|12 years ago|reply
Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
[+] [-] prirun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yodsanklai|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, not every PhD student can expect to get a well-paid job outside academia.
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|12 years ago|reply
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-...
[+] [-] dnautics|12 years ago|reply
My Academic path has been tortured; graduated from a really good undergrad, went to an even better grad school (my cohort is basically placed as faculty at places like Berkeley, Stanford, UCSD, TSRI, etc). But in grad school I lost time cleaning up after an irresponsible grad student (who, btw, is faculty at UW) and only published two papers that aren't flashy but are solid, and in second-tier journals. Did an amazing first postdoc actually possibly helping the world (pushing forward a drug candidate), at a third-tier school - since due to the economic collapse, was hard to get a job/good position in 2009. One publication, second-tier journal. Did a more amazing second "postdoc" (actually hired as a BS biologist, via craigslist) under a nobel laureate, at an institution where publishing isn't a priority, and the resources available are somewhat orthogonal to doing the comprehensive set of experiments necessary to get a cell/nature/science paper. My efforts resulted in improving an enzyme - three times (there are very few people who can claim to have done that even once), again, second-tier journals (two are papers-in-work, even though I've quit, i'm still going over there to get them written up). I'm not really ever going to get a faculty position (tried, two years running). I see crappier postdocs and grad students get their run, but you know what? I don't care anymore.
[+] [-] eykanal|12 years ago|reply
One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-minded people to have good lab-meeting style discussions about how to tackle a project. Industry positions can be pretty attractive.
[+] [-] timr|12 years ago|reply
The thing about the software industry is that "interesting" tends to be defined down -- for example, you'll be working on a CRUD app, but the "interesting" part is that you're doing it "at scale". Or you'll be doing some "interesting" refactor of a hard piece of software, that isn't interesting in any other way. Or most insidious of all...there's nothing really "interesting" in your job, and you just get inured to the day-to-day nature of the work, which always tends to look the same. The difference is in the big picture, and for most software jobs, the big picture just drains your soul.
I'm pretty lucky in that the project I'm working on now has a truly "interesting" technical component, but it still doesn't compare with the idea that I could be working on an interesting technical problem that also might lead to a new antibiotic or vaccine...or just discovering something new. I miss that part.
[+] [-] burntsushi|12 years ago|reply
Every now and then, I casually leaf through job ads and I have no idea how to tell which are which. I think that's what scares me. I get this feeling that when it comes time to join industry, it's just going to be a crapshoot---maybe I'll get lucky and maybe I won't.
(Note that this isn't a criticism lodged in comparison to academia. I've already made up my mind that I'll be leaving once I graduate.)
[+] [-] _delirium|12 years ago|reply
I know there are places that are more open-minded towards publishing your results in the open literature, but the majority of companies seem to put roadblocks in the way. I know some people who have done very interesting work (one at Exxon, for example) and will never be allowed to talk publicly about it, because it's their company's trade secret now.
[+] [-] plg|12 years ago|reply
It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia.
PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
[+] [-] mynewwork|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] santaclaus|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
[+] [-] gjuggler|12 years ago|reply
But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists.
Wait a minute — don't small software startups have equally poor success rates? (e.g. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...)
If uncertainty of success was his major concern, hasn't the author chosen a pretty poor next step in life?
[+] [-] newyorklenny|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parkaboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k2enemy|12 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2012/data_table.cfm
[+] [-] eranki|12 years ago|reply
Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...
Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip.
And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|12 years ago|reply
I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes.
The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)
[+] [-] zenbowman|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand, during my time as a PhD student doing research for a top tier university, I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all.
I think the existing academic model is unfair to both professors and especially to undergraduate student. Allowing the very top professors to focus on research, while making the rest take teaching seriously could remedy the situation.
[+] [-] doktrin|12 years ago|reply
Research has to happen somewhere. Where research happens, there will always be bunk projects. Some will fail despite good intentions, some due to negligence.
Given that there will always be some waste, you can do a lot worse than putting the $ towards academia. The alternative being a research institution, where researchers are paid actual living wages.
There are pros and cons to both models, but academia is undeniably cheaper. Thus, the cost of failure is lower. I didn't mention the third alternative, which is to remove public funding from research altogether. I don't think this is a good idea.
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|12 years ago|reply
It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax.
That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
[+] [-] ry0ohki|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|12 years ago|reply
It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their own html site has just progressed technology.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|12 years ago|reply
Welcome to the party, comrade! Want a beer?
(No, seriously, it's not bad being a socialist. Turn off the American anti-applause-lights that are designed to make us look eeeeeeviiiiil and examine what our actual positions are. We're an ideology like more-or-less any other, with plenty of valid points even outsiders acknowledge.)
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
[+] [-] dnautics|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3voices|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dewie|12 years ago|reply
Oh give me a break.
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|12 years ago|reply
\o/
[+] [-] Balgair|12 years ago|reply
[0]http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx... [1]https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_act...
[+] [-] slamdesu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Create|12 years ago|reply
Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.
This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.
http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis.
http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
[+] [-] api|12 years ago|reply
Basic research is economically worthless-- you can't patent a concept or a law of nature, nor can you sell understanding of nature's principles to anyone. The transistor may be worth billions, but the understanding that enabled the transistor is worth $0 as there is no way to monetize it.
The economic worth of scientific understanding seems to obey an extreme hockey-stick graph: it is worthless until it nears the instant of delivering a marketable technology, at which point it skyrockets. As a result, the market only rewards the last few people in a very long line of innovation that began with basic principles. Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions. How much is Tim Berners-Lee worth? How about the communications theorists before him that pioneered the idea of hypertext? (Do we even know who they were?) ... and so on, with each step back in time being worth exponentially less.
Why do science, except as a hobby?
[+] [-] academocrat|12 years ago|reply
How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)?
How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)?
How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)?
How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love it.
[+] [-] Create|12 years ago|reply
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
[+] [-] jamesash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selimthegrim|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Isn't this what endowmnets and tuition is for? Imaginge of google or GE hired people and forced them to raise money from the federal government to actually build their next project? Notwithstanding the mis-appropriation of the profits, purely from a managerial perspective this is highly flawed.
The flipside is also true, Universities are sturctured to leverage outside capital rather than their own (despite having gobs of it). MIT has $11B in the bank, they are not desperate for cash. To do "science", or otherwise.
[+] [-] egocodedinsol|12 years ago|reply
My favorite example:
Janelia Farm - I believe they expect 50% of their projects to fail.
A Janelia recruitment excerpt is illustrative (and you don't have to have done a post-doc even to lead a lab):
"We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, neurobiologists and physicists who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research.
All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants. Scientists at Janelia have no formal teaching duties and minimal administrative responsibilities. Janelia labs are small groups of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians tackling challenging research problems that are expected to have transformative impact. Group leaders are expected to engage in the direct conduct of research in a highly interactive and collaborative environment."
It's not the only way - and I doubt Janelia thinks it should be - but this style could be good for science in general. Even if funding levels return, I think they should probably return in a different form. Janelia might offer a blueprint for that.
http://www.janelia.org/
[+] [-] singingfish|12 years ago|reply
If you're technically minded, open source software developer provides many of the good things about academic work without many of the downsides.