Unsolicited advice for students contemplating a career in scientific research:
Don’t — unless you’re passionate about life in the lab and willing to undergo a long apprenticeship, at low wages, with an uncertain outcome, gain a situation where, against long odds, you can compete for position and money to do the research that interests you. Understand this: The chances of making it are not good.
The rhetoricians of academe and their political, industrial, and editorialist pals regularly spout off about the urgency of enticing more young Americans into scientific careers. Nonetheless, long-standing impediments remain in place.
Thousands of young Ph.D.‘s are stacked up in minimum-wage postdoc holding patterns for lack of full-fledged positions. For years it’s been predicted that droves of old-timers would be stepping down from academic posts, making room for a new generation. But the seniors of science continue to show wondrous durability, perhaps because the grant system is loaded in their favor.
Though the graying chieftains of biomedical grants land routinely bemoan the paucity of funds for young researchers, they persist in doing little about it — coincidentally or not, to their own benefit. As reported in Nature (March 20, 2008), the National Institutes of Health “now funds significantly more people over age 70 than under the age of 30.”
“We’re eating our seed corn,” says NIH Director Elias Zerhouni. Bon appetit!
This is not a newly discovered menace. Science (June 25, 2004) reported that “experts have watched with alarm as the proportion of researchers under 35 receiving grants from NIH has slipped from 23% in 1980 to below 4% in 2001.”
Various schemes at NIH to assist young researchers have come and gone in recent years without admirable results. The folklore of science credits youth with great creativity, but the young remain largely shut out of the NIH grant system. In contrast to the European system, where powerful Herr Professors dominate resources and control appointments, the American system was designed to encourage and support independent investigators. It still does to a large extent, but with the federal research budget in the doldrums, and graduates pouring out of the Ph.D. pipeline, independence is waning. Postdoc appointments were intended to put a polish on Ph.D. training. They still do, but with serial appointments no rarity, they’ve also become a job bank for otherwise unemployed young scientists.
Federal money, the mainstay of academic research, remains in the doldrums, with NIH flat for the sixth successive year. At NASA, which has been cutting its science programs to pay for the useless International Space Station, the science chief, Alan Stern, resigned last week, after less than a year in the job. Industry is holding steady in research spending or pulling back; it’s also setting up or expanding research facilities abroad.
Students who value material reward should not stake their hopes on scientific work. A few superstars hit the jackpot with patents or high-level, well-paying appointments. But for most of those who make it through the lengthy training mill to solid research appointments, the financial rewards are not outstanding. Five to seven years to the Ph.D. is not unusual in science — followed by at least a few years as a postdoc. College classmates who opted for the three years to a law degree, or a year or to the MBA, are likely to be in grownup, well-paying jobs long before our young, hopeful scientist makes the grade.
My advice to aspiring scientists: You should want it bad before you set out on that long and difficult trail. If you do, go for it.
