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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.
Spot on. No funding = no tenure = bye-bye faculty position and no more lab. Very proud of the papers we put out and the 3 PhD students and 1 MS student that graduated before the end though. We had just uncovered a possible mechanism for how an actin-binding protein could be involved in invadopodia formation and cancer metastasis (cancer cells escaping their initial tumor).
You have a multi-billion-dollar-sales patented drug? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund NIH grants. Or make your own equivalent grants to truly independant researchers.
Enter into a licensing deal on a drug patent? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund grants.
-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
These issues honestly aren't that big of a problem for all but a handful of people; certainly not for anyone in the biomedical sciences.
-Idiot reporters who completely, constantly, and continually misrepresent your research (should it make the presses)
That's certainly true, but I would add that university PR departments are just as awful, and scientists willingly submit to that.
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.
What makes you think the current environment is anything new? Do you think that Americans (or any other nationality) were somehow less ignorant and anti-intellectual 30 years ago, or 100? The only thing that's definitely worse is that electronic media have made it so much easier for us to read all the awful things that Joe Public says about us. At the same time, there are more people working in science than ever before, it's much more ethnically diverse (our imported Chinese laborers are treated very well compared to the men who built railroads in the late 1800s), and the opportunities for women keep getting better. We also have something resembling a real community of scientists that can advocate for common interests, instead of being merely a handful of aristocrats who could afford to tinker in labs.
I don't want to sound too idealistic, because I agree with the basic premise of the article, but I'm obsessed with the recurring theme of social decay and lamentations for some fantasy golden age that never really existed. The real problem isn't that society has turned against us, it's that policy makers, university bureaucrats, and senior scientists have deliberately generated an over-supply of PhD recipients, and we've simultaneously become utterly dependent on a pool of government funding that is not infinitely growable. I am not happy about any of this, since it is painfully obvious that I picked the wrong career 15 years ago, but I'm not going to blame Middle America for my shitty job prospects. (And I say this as someone who is not usually shy about expressing my elitist disdain for the ignorance of Middle America.)
Didn't we see an article recently (like this AM for me) discussing lack of reproducability in studies?
And not as in "noone bothered to reproduce our study", but "we couldn't even reproduce our own study when someone paid us to"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"