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When Scientists Give Up
New submitter ferespo sends a report from All Things Considered about the struggle for scientific funding in today's political and economic environment. "Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them." It's a tough situation for new scientists trying to set up labs. In addition to all of the scientific work they do, it's essentially a full-time job in addition to that to maintain funding. The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table. The consequences of this are two-fold: not only are we giving up on the types of research that led to so many of today's marvels, but many promising young scientists are giving up on the field altogether.
Just find a way to link global warming to your thesis
Try the "not immediately useful" sciences, like astronomy, which are shedding researchers like crazy as the NSF / what-have-you cuts their budgets and increase "proposal pressure". Just talking to a PhD will reveal two hard truths about being a scientist: you will never be rich and you will never have job security. It takes a special kind of crazy to be a scientist these days.
But, but, but, the free market will solve this problem right? It solves everything!
America is fast becoming a Design and Services Economy, best to leave the real innovation to China and others.
Except China hasn't done any particularly innovative research yet, at least in the biomedical sciences. Its biggest success story is BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute, although they rarely use the full name), which is sort of like the Foxconn of genomics. I don't mean that in a bad way, because they've been very productive (and their employees seem to be better-paid and less suicidal), but they're basically just a sequence factory. Ironically, all of the tech they're using was developed in the US and UK. Their approach to developing their own sequencing technology? Buy a US company (Complete Genomics).
Although you're partly right about "move to China" being the solution - they've been trying to repatriate leading expat scientists for years (with some success), but now they've started luring non-Chinese too. (Most of whom don't actually move to China, but maintain joint appointments, because you'd have to be absolutely insane to leave California for China if you weren't native Chinese.) Still, anyone in that position is usually going to be in the top tier of researchers already (one is a Nobel laureate), not the hypothetical junior faculty member worrying about tenure.
We're at a point where there's nothing going for scientists. They have to fight, all simultaneously:
-for funding in a very crowded market
-Politicians trying to control the results of what they do, to the point where the scientific integrity is at risk
-Govt's muzzling you because they don't want pesky things like facts to get in the way of their ideology
-Idiot reporters who completely, constantly, and continually misrepresent your research (should it make the presses)
-umpteen bajillion quacks who don't know their ass from their mouth, yet somehow manage to convince people that they are right and that actual experts are wrong (ie: Jenny McCarthy, or whoever FoodBabe is)
Doing scientific research is hard enough as it is, without having to deal with the current environment of anti-intellectualism.
I'm honestly surprised that scientists arn't yet being marched into concentration camps at gunpoint.
Not just research... EVERYTHING is totally risk averse. This is why every new song sounds and looks the same. Why we keep getting remakes, reboots, and blatent copies of the same old story over and over in the movies. There is a "patch" for this with the indie film community and the indie music scene. An indie research community would be cool, but they keep arresting people trying to do basic chemistry at home. http://io9.com/5119166/teen-wi...
Prvate funding is more risk averse, and more short term than public... In today's business climate, long term thinking is the quarter after next.
That's kind of the point of the article. We are stopping use of tax dollars, and guess what? Private companies don't want to fund research, so it just doesn't happen. Great for your (short term) taxes, great for the companies (short term) profits, bad in the long term for absolutely everyone.
I assume that's exactly what I assume low-tax narcissists like you want.
No, actually the government was very dynamic at one time and got a lot of really impressive research done. Then people like you who think "government bad" started to complain about taxes and regulation, and over the course of the past 40 years or so, you've managed to suck a lot of life out of the government. It's the whole Gordon Gecko philosophy: greed is good. No, actually, it isn't. What's good is working together.
Clearly, we need to encourage more young people to go into STEM fields. Until then, more H1-Bs for the best and brightest biomed workers.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
Even then, the problem is the fundamental science aspect. That's what they can't get funding for. You're talking about engineering work, something we're trying to turn into a product. You'd still need to be able to convince the NIH to throw some of that money at people who are trying to find out the answers to questions that may or may not ever have a practical application. But we won't know if there's a practical application until we do the research.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
Historically, our most notable scientists were working at day jobs or otherwise independently wealthy, and did amazing research on their own as a hobby. Some devoted entire wings of their house towards scientific research, amassing a collection of equipment (or specimens) over decades.
Henry Cavendish, of the Cavendish experiment, is one such example. The experiment was so delicate that air currents would affect the measurements, so Cavendish set up the experiment in a shed on his property and measured the results from a distance, using a telescope.
There used to be a term "Gentleman Scientist" for this, but it might more accurately be called "self-funded research".
Consider Paul Stamets as a modern example. With only an honorary doctorate, he is co-author on many papers and has proposed several medications, including treatments for cancer.
I could also nominate Robert Murray Smith to the position. His YouTube Videos are as good as many published Chemistry papers.
The benefits are obvious: You get to work on whatever you think is interesting (or fruitful), you can set your own pace, and you can draw your own line between supporting your dreams and your lifestyle: If you have a family emergency, you can pause your research and spend more money on personal welfare. It also forces you to come up with more efficient (read: less expensive) ways to work.
There's a wealth of useful equipment on eBay and other places, big expensive equipment is not out of the reach of the dedicated researcher. Ben Krasnow has three (I think) electron microscopes. I personally own a UV/VIS spectrophotometer. a microgram scale, and a Weston cell.
The idea that "research can only be done at the behest of government" or "is only associated with university" is a modern fiction. Government would *like* you to believe that everything depends on their whim and largesse, but it's not the only, nor even the best way.
Build a lab and start tinkering, or join a hackerspace. Lots of people do it. Lots of good science is done this way.
True that it's political nonsense, but can you honestly agree that a study to find out how to buy worcestershire sauce is worthy of government funding?
I have no idea. Can you provide a copy of the actual report? Or only third-hand accounts of this report from an obviously biased source (Wikipedia links to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that describes the organization the gives out the Golden Fleece Awards, with a three line summary of the report in question---what assurances do we have that this summary is accurate?)?
If the report's only purpose in life was to explain how to buy a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, then there is a problem. But is that really why the report was commissioned? Is that really all it says? Is is possible that the report is about purchasing food in general, with the sauce as an example? Is it possible that the report was commissioned in order to demonstrate how Byzantine the process of buying supplies is in an effort to cut down on paperwork in the long run? How do we know that the report actually cost $6,000?
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