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U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable' Prominent Researchers Warn
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The U.S. biomedical science system 'is on an unsustainable path' and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should 'confront the dangers at hand,' the authors write, and 'rethink' how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding."
It sure took you some time to notice the bloody obvious, folks. The only odd thing about this is why you only mention biomedical research.
Because pretty much all other fields have exactly the same problem: fairly massive over-production of graduates - in particular, people with a PhD. In times of shrinking university enrolments, and shrinking populations (in the West, that is). No one will ever need that many faculty. And for most jobs outside uni, that time spent in PhD comics land is not a good preparation. At all.
Interestingly, the same things can be said about High Energy Physics - in the last half century, physicists have figured out the standard model of particle physics. Meanwhile, the cost of pushing back the energy frontier (cf LHC) is at the level where it funding is required from a large portion of the Western world to make a major discovery. Research is driven by grad students and post docs, most of whom can never get a permanent position, while funding is diminishing in real terms.
For me, the current academic system needs updating from the 19th century. It is bad for science not to make the change, because we see the good staff leaving to find a proper job.
No, it means the gov't must fund more research, and further along the research path through clinical trials,etc...
Then, once the drug is proven, they MUST sell it to the lowest bidder from big pharmacy.
It's the only way profits can keep going up by double-digits every six months.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A bachelor in biology is no worse than a bachelor in some liberal arts field: you learn to read, write, and reason. There are lots of jobs open to you, just not in science.
Government funding is like this... Rather then getting a feedback loop where research generates profits which pay for expansions which lead to more jobs. What you instead have is a static grant being offered by the government. When that is consumed there is no more and the government not making any money on the process can't afford to engage in a feedback system.
Now, a private system is going to have its own issues but those issues will not be an over production of researchers competing for finite grant money.
And before anyone tells me this is a bad idea or that we need the government to do all this stuff... understand where I am coming from here. We had tens of thousands of engineers working for the military industrial complex and then the cold war ended... result? Many of them were out of a job. And guess where many of them lived? California. It was and still is a big defense contractor state. And what did those engineers do? Most of them found jobs in the private sector and to a large extent their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen. Suddenly business had access to a glut of engineers. And that is what we got out of it.
So... consider that we might do well to push a lot of these bio medical researchers at the private sector... It might do them well, it might do their fields well, and it might do the nation well.
And hey, the US Federal government might actually see a monetary return through their tax recipes. So... everyone wins.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There's also the tricky matter that PhD students get paid minimal wages given their schooling, whereas career scientists need/expect to be paid a living wage that can support a family and build a retirement fund.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen.
What you said sounded very exciting right up to that point. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Western world decided to shift from a growth system, where women bear and raise children and the able bodied population slowly increases, to a system where the women enter the work force and children are few in number. If you measure it in years, they did this quite a long time ago. If you measure it in generations, it's only been a couple.
This had the consequence of dramatically reducing the number of "dependents" and increasing the percentage of people doing "productive work" as an economist would measure it. But, that only lasts till the generation that started the ball rolling retire and become dependents themselves. Then the spiral to oblivion starts, and you can't reverse it without death and destruction.
The women in the work force are no longer "bonus productivity", now they're essential resources to care for the dependent elderly. You can't even acknowledge and the situation and correct it at this point, unless you want to leave your senior citizens to die of neglect. But the longer it continues, the worse it gets, until eventually the people are so few in number that economies of scale break down and we regress to the lifestyle of primitives.
You don't need to have a PhD in Mathematics to understand this. Just a willingness to accept that everything you've been raised to believe was wrong.
Everything is in decline. It's going to continue this way for the rest of our lives. People will continue to refuse to accept the truth of what I've just said, and they'll point at a million different symptoms and call them causes, and we will go into further and further into decline until it collapses. Only at that point will there be people ready to start over.
I had a brief period in my youth where I worked as a life insurance agent, and got to see the proprietary data that makes up their actuary tables of life and death. I saw all this coming, spent my whole life trying to oppose it because I care too much about people to just ignore it, but all I ever got was sophistry, anger and people telling me how intolerant and stupid I was. But everything I saw has come to pass, and this is just another part of it.
Sometimes being a visionary means begging your foolish fellows to stop dancing and get the fuck off the train tracks, and getting run down by the train because you don't have the heart to let go.
I pity the younger generation. At least I got to spend the first half of my life in the shiny happy part. You young guys are in for a rough life. You get to try to measure up to a time of abundance that you will never experience for yourselves, and fail. That it will make it all the more painful, I expect.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Everything is in decline.
This is what I love about Slashdot. I can click on one article, and read about how we are doomed because robots will take all our jobs, and there will be no one to buy all the abundance of surplus goods and services. Then I can pop over here and read about how we are doomed because there is not enough workers to produce what we need. At least everyone agrees that we are doomed.
You heard it first here, folks. ShieldPuppy says we're all gonna die, all is woe, repent Ye and face damnation. The man knows the future, he's even from the future and thought so much about it he came here on Slashdot to inform us all of our fate, which is not good. A cave-dwelling existence is our ultimate destination, there's no escaping his analysis, he alone among us knows.
Here, have some data to substantiate my claims.
Changes in Workforce: Demographics and the Future of Work and Retirement
Dr. Jost Lottes
Institute on Aging
Portland State University
http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/researc...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Beyond that, working in research is pretty risky if you have a family. University labs are not allowed to have "war chests" much of the time, the professors get a grant, hire people, do the research, fire everyone when it is over. They play budgeting tricks to try to get grants to overlap enough that there is some continuity but if something is just a month off you can loose your entire lab and the collected experience of your people... which overall makes research slower, more expensive, lower quality, and holding on to good people more difficult.
There is one huge mathematical flaw with this argument, people are still having children at a higher rate then replacement. Not that it is the only flaw, your understanding of history, economics, or even the current world is pretty warped.
Hate to break it to you, but you are stupid and intolerant, which is why people have been saying that to you. Not that you are going to listen.
That's true, but again, you're looking on too short a time scale and missing the pattern. We're having children at a rate that exceeds that necessary to replace members of the "Great" generation, that came before the boomers. They're still around, and the Boomers are beginning to retire.
From the study I posted above by Dr. Jost Lottes:
Worker-to-beneficiary ratio in the US:
16 workers to 1 beneficiary in 1950
3.3 workers per beneficiary in 2003
2.1 workers per beneficiary in 2033 (projected)
You do understand that this is real, right? This is all based on hard data and real world facts; I'm not making this shit up as I go along.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
> The Western world decided to shift from a growth system, where women bear and raise children and the able bodied population slowly increases, to a system where the women enter the work force and children are few in number.
I will try to give a greater context than what a reading of actuary tables might give a young insurance agent. The roots of the current condition are far deeper than any single social revolution of any generation.
Yes, women entering the work force had an effect of natural decline in population growth. They were a sort of reserve capacity. Yes, this eventually will have a depressing effect on the economy. We still have some more reserve capacity, namely, expanding the work years of the population in reasonable ways by creating new opportunities for the elderly to be productive and remain engaged in society and be dependent for fewer years. After exhausting that last bit of reserve, we will perhaps truly stagnate.
However, relying on population growth is no longer sustainable. The human population has not slowly increased in the last few centuries, it had *exploded*. UK, for instance, increased its population by 2x in 1500 years (0-1500) and 20x in the 500 years after. While I am not suggesting that it should implode, it must go into a decline for centuries to come if we expect to thrive on this planet, long term. The environmental pressure and resource drainage initiated by your generation, and continued by ours, is spectacular. The difference between the environmental footprint of poor rural nations and the most prosperous nations today is 100-150x.
The western (and especially US) experience of abundance since WWII is also anomalous. It relied on the huge productivity differentials from the rest of the world. Now the world is slowly equalizing as the other populations also tap into their reserve capacities. So once again, to expect beyond the prosperity of your generation, baring another fundamental technology revolution, is not reasonable.
We will stagnate. But in context of what humanity went through, through our history (wars, disease, famine, ignorance), current "stagnation", which may last for centuries, is not that horrible, just mildly annoying. So we won't have even larger houses, trinkets and whatever that we don't really need. Is it really that natural or sustainable for everyone to want vacations on the other side of the planet? We still will lead relatively secure, healthy & engaged lives and that's enough.
The world was stagnant for much of its history. The growth spurt, the adolescence of mankind, from the industrial revolution onward, will have to slow at some point. The economists are simply wrong to target growth to the exclusion or detriment of everything else (in human growth terms - its wishing for Gigantism or taking steroids: ultimately the piper needs to be paid). It is OK for humans to settle down at this standard of living. We can think of growth once again, after it is viable to leave this planet. Now, more than ever, it is important for humanity to understand satisfaction.
Why do I ask? Well, look at your own statistics:
Worker-to-beneficiary ratio in the US: 16 workers to 1 beneficiary in 1950 3.3 workers per beneficiary in 2003 2.1 workers per beneficiary in 2033 (projected)
You do understand that this is real, right? This is all based on hard data and real world facts; I'm not making this shit up as I go along.
16 / 3.3 = 4.8 fold decrease in worker:retiree ratio in the US.
And yet, the system hasn't crashed yet.
3.3 / 2.1 is only a further 1.57 fold decrease, much smaller than the last few years
Why hasn't the system collapsed years ago?
1. An increase in general productivity (see http://www.epi.org/publication... for an interesting article in this regard)
2. Don't forget, these people do die and some leave behind considerable inheritances, which are taxed exorbitantly, even in the US.
Of course, some of this is paid for by US borrowing, which will have to taper off.
No, I believe it will take another decade to reach the point of collapse.
Sixteen people can carry a coffin with such ease that half of them can sit around and chat while half of them take a shift.
Four people can carry a coffin, but they cannot do it in shifts, or forward motion stops.
Three people can carry a coffin, but they will suffer greatly for the effort. Those things are heavy.
Two people cannot carry a coffin. They do not have the strength necessary.
Like you say, it's only a 1.5 fold decrease from 3 to 2. But it's a 1.5 fold decrease that we cannot afford.
Maybe if we offer the coffin enough fiat currency, it will grow legs!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
10 billion. Hans Rosling makes a compelling case from the numbers that the world population will peak at 10 billion, then slowly decline, because we've already passed "peak child" the year in which the largest number of children were born, that number is now gradually declining. Population will continue to increase for a while because the older cohorts are currently much smaller than the younger cohorts, so as the younger cohorts age into the older categories, we'll have a "filling out" of the age distribution.
However, I don't think there's any reason to assume that we're going to stagnate. We're also on the cusp of a set of new technologies which will make the human race dramatically wealthier, because we've barely scratched the surface of the potential of information technology and automation.
The only fundamental limitation to our growth is energy production and delivery. We're heading towards a day when we can no longer rely on our current primary energy source, fossil fuels, perhaps because we'll exhaust the easily-reached reserves, and perhaps because we'll decide that they're too difficult to use without excessive environmental impact. But we're also rapidly improving our ability to capture solar energy, in its various forms. For that matter, we've successfully performed net-positive controlled fusion; perhaps we'll learn to harness that.
I do think the west, especially the US, is likely headed for a period of slower growth than we're accustomed to, or perhaps worse, stagnation or decline. This is because globalization (which many think is a dirty word, but I think is fantastic) is spreading the wealth over more of the human race.
This may seem to contradict the other current trend of concentration of capital, but historically they've gone hand in hand. During the initial expansion phase massive fortunes are created as the masses reap the benefits of the new capabilities in their personal lives, but the bulk of the financial gain goes to a relative few. Then, as technology matures the productivity gains spread; the fortunes don't disappear, but new fortunes are created at a slower rate and the wealth gap closes, because competition drives out the massive profit margins leaving the wealth in the hands of more people.
For that matter, I'm far from convinced there isn't another technological revolution on the horizon, and another after that, and so on. It's tempting to believe that the knowledge we've achieved so far is nearing the limit, but very bright people of generations and centuries past have believed the same thing... and they've all been not just wrong, but stupefyingly wrong. In fact, there seems to be a strong correlation between the number of very smart people who are convinced that all that's left to discover is making what we already know more precise and the closeness of the next earth-shattering discovery.
Indeed, we have powerful reasons right now to believe that we're on the cusp of yet another revolution in our understanding of physics. We currently have two thoroughly-elaborated and extensively supported models of the structure of reality... and they're mutually contradictory. Relevant to the current article, our understanding of biology is advancing at a breakneck pace, as we move from understanding only gross biological processes to elaborating the detailed chemical processes and, even more important, how they're described, defined and implemented by genetic material. Informatics is crucial to that effort.
I can't think of a single field of research in which we aren't currently learning orders of magnitude faster than ever before, and which hasn't recently seen, or appears to be in a position to soon find, revolutionary new understanding. In that context how can we not expect additional technological revolutions? But even without new fundamental science, I think it's clear that we've barely scratched the surface of what
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Real actuary speaking here. Societies generally put resources into producing things that the society wants. They put more resources into things that they want more of *relative to other things that they don't want as badly*. It is that relative allocation that is important. If we didn't want to live longer lives, we would spend our resources on present day consumption rather than on medical services. The fact that the cost of health care keeps going up and up is merely a reflection of the fact that (in the 1st world) we have (more than) enough food, adequate shelter, and plenty of shiny things to keep us happy, so what we really want to spend money on is a pill that keeps our bodies younger for longer. So unless we "unlearn" all the things that give us this phenomenal productivity (through natural catastrophe, war, plague, etc.), we don't have to worry about decline.
One lecturer put it well by saying that he couldn't wait until we are spending 99% of GDP on health care, because at that point all of our wants and needs for food, shelter, entertainment, intellectual challenge, etc will be satisfied for pocket change so the only thing actually worth putting society's resources into is extending life.
"many researchers focus on research and are terrible at and hostile to teaching"
But that's where the incentives are, the criteria for promotion. I was told at a small faculty meeting last week at our college that teaching and service are flat-out totally ignored for tenure and promotion decisions, only published papers are counted (despite the written rule being otherwise). Although I'm not on that track (and glad of it), it's hard to blame people who literally get fired if they focus on teaching too much. That's one of the structures that should definitely be changed.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Then we have the people who don't get that concern over nuclear war prevented nuclear war and concern over ozone depletion pushed laws to reduce ozone depletion. We have an overabundance of people NOT listening to the sirens because they don't trust the smoke alarm.
The problem is if there is NO MONEY going to research -- there won't be enough people trained in the science because selfishly, they want to eat and raise families while doing their job.
Companies are perfectly happy to make billions a year pimping new formulations of old drugs or cough medicine -- next year's innovation; Avocado flavor! Evidenced by the fact that there is more spent on marketing at most drug companies than research.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Exactly. It is not the amount of funding per se, but the way it is given out that is the bigger problem. It is given in 4-5yr spans to labs. even worse, NIH budget changes every year, so their long term planning is usually screwed every year. Reducing the number of PhD students and mandating promotions to staff scientists would work only if funds are stable for a given lab.