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Worst Jobs In Science
FortKnox writes "Popular science has the worst jobs in science. Some are silly, some are sick, some make you angry, and some just flat-out suck." And some of them sound fun :)
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"They're grown by the thousands just for the purpose of dying in nasty ways."
Does PETA have a hissy-fit, or are they not cute and fuzzy enough to garner their attention?
What about the dude who smells people's armpits to test deodorant? I know it's overdone, but it's surely not overrated...
You raise a good point.
There is the option for Ph.D's to come to Canada. Almost all our baby-boomer faculty retire in the next 10 years. It probably won't pay so well as the USA, but there are quite a few intangible benefits, like social services and less violent crime.
You should be able to work here under NAFTA, with an M.Sc. or Ph.D. Not that you may want to, but it is an option, in a slightly out-of-sync economy.
When I was in high school I worked in the Clorox R&D center in Pleasanton, CA. Clorox makes (among other things) bleach, Hidden Valley Ranch (hint: it doesn't start out white) and Fresh Step kitty litter.
I was in AP Chemistry at the time, and I had a friend whose mother worked at Clorox. I volunteered to work there as part of a work study program for credit.
Of course, the only way to test and improve kitty litter is to test it with actual kitty byproducts. Both solid and liquid. I can fondly remember the days of placing stir bars in liters of cat urine to mix them up, then pipette-ing samples to coat the litter.
And, of course, there was only one way to test its effectiveness--lean in and take a hearty whiff. Yes, of kitty poo, as well. The labs' job was to come up with combinations of surfactactants and clays that would, ideally, eliminate the smell altogether, or at least replace it with a pleasant smell. We even had "a professional nose" who would come in and sniff the samples, assigning each sample with descriptions like "kiwi" or "slight fruity scent".
To be quite honest, however, it was pretty fascinating. Not smelling cat feces, of course. But when you think about it, it's one of the few products that must satisfy the sensitivities of two species, including the sense of smell, as well as the cat's sense of touch. It must absorb odor as well as liquid; clump, and surround the kitty waste; and not disintegrate into too mush dust. Oh, and it also has to be biodegradable.
I was sold.
I signed up for a (paid) internship during the summer and made big money. And I always washed my hands before dinner.
Post-doc'ing has devolved from a training ground for future tenure-track academics to being slave labor with a possible carrot dangled years in your future.
This, unfortunately is true. However, speaking as someone who is starting their post-doc, I can tell you that the money is significantly better than it is as a grad-student. As for the budgetary constraints, yeah, unless you are in defense right now, funding is not going to be as easy at least until W. is voted out of office.
On the positive side, if you can find a post-doc where they will let you run your own show (i.e. you go into a post-doc with your own ideas, rather than simply serving as someone elses labor fodder), then things can be rather different. Additionally, the NIH post doctoral funding does not preclude you from getting additional funding or $$'s from consulting or from your own business. (VC funding is starting to look up for biotech).
As for the hours, yeah. Science is hard dude, what were you expecting? So I guess you need to ask yourself why you are interested? There are other intangibles, but if you are simply interested in making money, go sell cars or something. I will tell you though, that making money and science are not mutually exclusive. I was able to make out quite nicely with a couple of small inexpensive databases, a couple of SGI's and a hired computational chemist for one years investment and I know of a number of individuals who are doing quite nicely. My neighbor is a VP at a biotech company (Ph.D.) and he is doing quite well, two of the Ph.D's at his company are driving Ferrari's, one of my dissertation committee members has co-founded a biotech company and is making wine in his spare time, my Ph.D. mentor has his own biotech company, etc...etc...etc... It just takes some (harder) work, a little insight, some luck, a focus on what you want to do and a really good idea of your target market.
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It was definitely a "make you sick" job.
John
I work in a diagnostics lab that deals with enteric parasites for one of its mainstay products. The in-house testing is done with fecal samples that are from known positive or negative individuals. The samples must be homogenized in a diluent before they are used with the kit. It is one person's unfortunate job to request, and process the samples into a 2 litre specimen master lot. It involves asking our in-house negative patient to crap in a collection container and bring it back to the lab, then taking said sample and placing it in a laboratory mixer (industrial blender) with the diluent, then filtering that mess into a 2L bottle. I'm just glad I work in the isolation lab, where I don't have to smell it.
I'm glad someone brought up the crybabyish attitude that write-up displayed. Why is it so hard to understand that Bush only limited stem-cell research that the government funds? Private research institutes can research any new stem-cell line they want to. As long as they don't live off tax money, they are in no way restricted in the source of their research.
Stop whining, and find some rich Democrat who hates Bush, and ask for a grant. They should be more than happy to give their personal money, just to spite him. In fact it should be far easier to get private funding, as long as you ask the right people, like Barbara Streisand and Alec Baldwin. They ought to give you any money you ask for, since they hate Bush so much.
I'll get off my soapbox now. Thank you.
I'm currently in a genetics class at college and most of us in the class would have to agree that these are definitely not cute or fuzzy enough to garner any bleeding heart attention. After staring at these flies through microscopes for hours checking mutations, even my vegetarian friends were dumping them in the quik-kill with some certain gusto.
Another important job listed in there that will eventually lead to savings of billions per annum is the metric system advocate. However, I do not consider that a science job, it is a political job to comply with international agreements. It may take another 100 years to convert the US, but it will happen and the savings will be huge.
My wife has had a somewhat poor job in science, too. She worked for her Ph.D. by killing rats (by injecting cold salt water to their hearts and chopping their heads off), and sliced their brains to 400 um slices, inserted some rather toxic neuromodulators and measured the responses of the brain slices for long hours. Once her Ph.D. was getting completed, his boss left the university to work in the medical industry, and the research unit was finished -- and she never got her degree, just spent several years killing rats in rather obnoxious way and working with poisoneous chemicals.
-- Imperial units must die --
Back in the early days of the US space program, when rockets ran on Hydrazine, there was a poor fellow who's job was to go up to the rocket, stick his head in a vent port and sniff to see if any of this horribly Hyrdrazine was leaking. If not, the launch proceded. If it was leaking, he was _that_ close to dying.
But there's even worse: how would you like to be the poor sap who has to go pull the dead crew out of a malfuntioning nuclear reactor that has already exploded and thrown fatal amounts of radiation. Somebody's got to get the bodies out.
Oh yeah, sign me up.
That's got to be one of the most gruesome ways to die I've ever heard of... impaled to the ceiling by reactor control rods and irradiated. Hopefully he died quickly.
I knew someone who had to ice a rabbit every day with a steel bar. Couldn't use drugs because they interferred with the tissue tests. She had to whack it, then disect it, then perform 12 hours of tests. This was all in a dark room as well (light also interferred with the tests.)
A funny story from those days: We had her sac (a common term used in animal research, short for sacrifice) a rabbit for us to eat (I worked in a nearby lab and we had an extra one that we would have had to kill anyway.) A few years earlier, some people in a nearby lab had done the same thing. Only thing is, they use sodium pentabarbitol to kill the rabbit. They cooked it up in a nice stew and ate it at a table in their back yard. Not long after eating, everyone passed out. Apparently, the sodium pentabarb didn't break down during cooking as they assumed it would. Lessoned learned, we killed our rabbit without drugs.
We got to chatting about bad jobs at work a few years ago. There were some doozies (orderly at an asylum, cleaning out cement trucks), but the most memorable was beheading rats.
One of my coworkers, when he was in college, worker for a research project in the biology department (I believe that was the department). They were doing research on rats. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I seem to recall that it involved cutting part of some organ out, exposing them to potential carcinogens, waiting a while for the organ to regrow, then examining the organ for cancer.
The highlight was killing the rats for the final examination. Apparently there was a little rat guillotine. My coworkers said that the first few rats were easy, but after that the rats started smelling the blood and would panic.
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I worry mostly about the Barney-the-Dinosaur looking icon they have next to the job...
I didn't find it at all ironic that Barney-the-Dinosaur was used to symbolize emotional trauma.
Of course, my kids still don't understand why I hate their little talking Barney so. I threw that thing across the room one day when it started singin "I love you, you love me" and my wife yelled at me. Guess I need a little Anger Management.
Like what I said? You might like my music
The few months I was a laminar flow technician -- moving my arms in a limited range all day in a consciencious and methodical imitation of a bad mime imitating a robot (which you do because if you get your germs in the patient's anti-immune serum he might DIE) -- I would have given my right testicle for the opportunity to kick back and count some fish!
Guess it's all relative.
As for an actual (albeit non-science) job, I had a friend that worked for a legal firm specializing in class action cases. He was their mailroom/photocopy clerk, and had to make admissable copies of all the evidence used for a court case. One case involved a sanitary napkin manufacturer, and his job involved making photocopies of used maxi-pads (sealed in plastic bags, but still gross) to be submitted as court evidence.
Dammit, we made the list!
IUTBAFR (I Used to be a Fusion Researcher), and frankly, I never felt it was even close to the worst job in science. But I always worried about becoming a Richard Post. You see, fusion research is full of old-timers who've been working on it since Project Sherwood days, who have always been thinking "just a few more years and we'll have it". I suppose it's kind of like being a Red Sox fan. When they started work on Fusion for Peace in the 50's, it was 20-30 years away. When I started working on fusion in 1995 it was 20-30 years away. Now its 2003 and it's 20-30 years away...
A little bit of info about Richard Post. He was the primary proponent of "open" systems, basically magnetic cylinders which were either very long, had magnetic "mirrors" or had some sort of electromagnetic "endcap". It was a rival to the Tokamak method of plasma containment. A few were built, but the vast majority of the magnetic confinement money and attention went to Tokamaks. Whether it should have is a matter of debate. Basically, Richard Post spent much of his career trying to get research funds for a design which was not the favorite. There was still enough money for a decent research program, and the research basically showed that the mirrors (which were easy to do) caused too many problems (hence the term "mirror instability"), and nobody ever came up with a good enough endcap. Last I heard, Post was doing some work on flywheel technology.
I put in my tour of duty. Maybe sometime I will go back to working on fusion, but I'd like to get ~something~ done before then. I fear not accomplishing anything with my life.
FYI, my personal opinion (warning: rant) is that the primary reason fusion is such a slow business is that it takes years to simulate a design, raise money for it, build it, then test it and see how it performs. Imagine how long it would have taken to create the airplane if you had to spend 20 years every time you went back to the drawing board. I feel that as long as bigger = better in fusion, sustainable fusion will never happen. If you have to build it that big to make it work, the design is wrong.