Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs

stillnotelf writes "ScienceInsider is covering a National Institutes of Health advisory committee report that details problems in the U.S. biomedical research workforce. Current policies encourage the training of large numbers of biomedical graduate students, as they are the cheapest labor available, but the research enterprise is not structured to absorb them into full-time scientist positions. The report's varied suggestions include removing graduate student funding from investigator-linked research grants (shifting it to institution-linked training grants instead) and encouraging the hiring of staff scientists as permanent lab members. This would reduce the number of trainees, but increase the proportion of trainees that maintain careers as researchers. ScienceInsider further notes that a National Research Council report 14 years ago noted a similar problem, but never motivated change."

Comments

System is rotten

[Anonymous Coward]

As the boyfriend of a neuroscience postdoc I'm often baffled at how broken this system has become. Many scientific reports are false or suffer serious problems that are never revealed because the level of competition created by the squeezed grant funding has made a an incorrect hypothesis a career ending disaster. The work load is really high too. Labs have Saturday mandatory work hours and 11-12 hour work days during the week. All this with a 40k salary and limited benefits. Surely the brain is poorly enough understood that there's plenty of room for research. The system as it is, with so much bad research out there by scientists who were afraid of abandoning their hypothesis and watching their career disintegrate, is fully rotten. I'm convinced radical changes are necessary for it to offer any benefit to society at all.

Re:also get rid of unpiad and college only interns

[Anonymous Coward]

Internships are such a fuzzy concept for most people. Among I.T. folks in particular, I've seen quite the battle cry lately for unpaid internships to be made flat-out illegal. That would be a foolish thing to do and here's why.

Unpaid internships were originally conceived by universities so that the student could come into a company, get a bit of training, and see how the business works from the inside. The company is supposed to derive no benefit from having the intern there. I've worked in places that did this and this kind of experience is very valuable for the student because it gives them a glimpse of the "real world" and hopefully informs their career choices.

Paid internships, in contrast, do have the intern doing real entry-level work and, for the most part, has all of the responsibilities of an employee.

Any company which brings in unpaid interns and has them doing actual work which directly or indirectly benefits the company is probably operating outside the law in most states. Any states which do not expressly prohibit this need to have their citizens stand up and make it so, but with the reason and clear-mindedness to not just make all unpaid internships flat-out illegal as you would propose.

Re:"Biomedical" is too broad a category

[Anonymous Coward]

Some areas can't hire post-docs and staff scientists fast enough.

Really? Which ones? Do tell.

I'm on my second post-doc in bioinformatics - and I had to move to Asia just to get that. Many nights I'm literally awake at 3am wondering how I'm going to feed my family when my current contract runs out.

In a couple years, sequencing a human genome is going to cost $1,000 (or less) and millions of people will have genome sequences to be analyzed. Ideally, I'd get a job writing software for (medical) genome analysis. But there's only so much of that kind of software that's really needed and lots of young hotshots looking to prove themselves. So realistically that's a long shot.

In a few years most major hospitals will probably have bioinformatics departments to analyze genome sequence (like radiology departments to analyze x-rays) so maybe I could find something there. But then this morning I was thinking maybe I could go back to school and get a masters in genetic counseling.

So, anyway, if you actually know where the biomedical jobs are, I'd love to know. It sure would be great not to have to worry quite so much about how I'm going to feed my family

Re:time for more apprenticeships over older collge

[Samantha Wright]

I must admit I'm on a bit of a high horse, as my life's passion has always been bioinformatics. I'm a better software engineer than most software engineers I know, and I fulfilled part of my Bachelor's general education requirement with a third-year course in physical biochemistry taught by the same professors as my mandatory third-year proteins-and-enzymes biochemistry course. (They weren't exactly picky.) I'll also be honest in that I'm just entering my Master's in the fall, and can't really comment on the realities of the job market with anything but wide-eyed hope.

My advice is that you may actually want to consider computing more seriously. Research hospitals pay out their rear ends for bioinformaticians just with masters' degrees, and that's in a field where only a handful of institutions really offer dedicated programs, doing applied work (i.e., not a lot of code review.) Software engineering ability really is not actually a prerequisite, as most of the code turned out by computational biologists is utter garbage by engineering standards (and people with wetlab experience are uniformly way better at writing papers.) I'd also imagine grants are relatively easy to get, if you wanted to keep to a more biochemical circle, given that even popular science magazines are aware of the "[too much] data problem," but, well, I'm no lab head. :)

The truth is that there are very few CS people with an interest in molecular biology or biochemistry. Out of the 14 students graduating this year from my program in our computational biology-and-medicine concentration, I was the only student who definitely professed an interest in genomics rather than robot-aided surgery. (It wasn't the largest CS department, but I've got another anecdote—a friend looking at prospective supervisors at Notre Dame sparked interest just by mentioning that she knew "a bioinformatician.") On the whole, the amount of knowledge in genetics and chemistry required to be an effective molecular biologist just doesn't fit into the learning approach of most people who seek out post-undergrad education in computer science; they have a certain whimsy to them that you'd recognize mostly in philosophy or literature majors. They're just not detail-oriented enough to get all the way into it.

So... don't despair. Not yet, anyway.