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Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia
BarbaraHudson writes: Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels has written about the decline of research grants to younger researchers. "For more than a generation, grants for young scientists have declined. The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant who are 36 years old or younger dropped from 18 percent in 1983 to 3 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the average age when a scientist with a medical degree gets her first of these grants has risen from just under 38 years old in 1980 to more than 45 in 2013. The implications of these data for our young scientists are arresting. Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science. It is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions."
When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens. No one cares about consequences that will only happen after they have left the job... So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.
You just have to be researching solar panels.
When the public funds crappy studies that are designed to keep people employed at a University what do you expect?
They'll have to wait for their parents to die before they get those cushy floor-washing jobs. It's not like just anybody can push a mop around, 10 years of experience is absolutely required.
Johns Hopkins has an endowment of about $3,000,000,000 (25th highest in the US). Instead of complaining about the lack of grants, the president of Johns Hopkins should be issuing grants.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Look, you brain-dead anonymous clown, without gov't money the entire modern world wouldn't exist. But I'm sure you'd be happy taking a horse to work and writing letters to communicate.
With 5+ postdocs for every position, .... now if they only had a postdoc in fear mongering maybe they could get some of the $500+ billion in government security spending in the US this year. Who needs medicine or basic research when there is terrists.
Illogical world - that's what this is.
This is really a general issue with our society right now. Young people can't be researchers because they don't get grant money, because no one trusts them to be doing research. Young people can't get jobs because everyone knows that you need at least 10 years experience to get a job -- never mind how you get 10 years of experience these days when no apprenticeships or similar seem to exist anymore. If you're lucky enough to find some job that doesn't make a big deal about experience, then young people aren't allowed enough pay to actually cover their bills and student loans. Instead of supporting educated young people and thinking of them as an investment that will bring us new ideas, new businesses, etc., I feel the elders tend to look at this young generation as lazy entitled bums (which is not true at all, at least not in general).
I was a young person college instructor for a few years before I quit. Why? Because pay is low as an adjunct, and the number of courses you can count on kept declining because I was continually at the mercy of what the elder teachers decided to do. (If one of them wanted a class, I was bumped and simply lost pay because I was contract and they could do that.). I had excellent ratings from all my students, many telling me personally that I was one of the best professors they had because I put effort into my lectures... and now academics has lost me, probably for good, because of how I was treated. (Not that I mean to be tooting my own horn here, but I hope you understand it as a situation that is probably being repeated across the country right now with people much more intelligent than I). There was a movement to form an adjunct union at one of my schools, and when I spoke up saying that we young professors need to be able to pay bills and given a chance to grow our careers, I was shouted down by elders saying I was entitled and need to go work a full time job and teach on the side if I wanted to be a professor and heaven forbid also be able to pay my monthly bills. I don't recall past professors having to do all that extra work, but it is expected of a young person now. So I took their advice and got a full time job... but left teaching entirely. I don't want to be in an environment like that, and it's not fair to my students to half-ass a class because I'm exhausted from my full time job. Most of those professors were at least in their 60s -- what will universities do in 10 years when they start to retire, and they've driven off of all the people like me that wanted to teach?
There just doesn't seem to be any opportunity left for a young person, especially in the technical fields. The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.
The article talks about the number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant and the average age of principal investigators who get these grants. To me, there is a very important missing data point; the age distribution of principal investigators submitting grant requests. This will show whether or not the age difference is due to the selection process or the age distribution of the grant requests. It is not a given that the age distribution of grant requests is the same year by year.
can get a damn job waiting tables and washing floors and delivering newspapers
It would be better to send the old geezers to wait on tables. Most scientific breakthroughs are made by young people without all the status quo cobwebs clogging up their brains. The most famous pictures of Albert Einstein show him with gray hair and wrinkled skin. But all his big breakthroughs happened by the time he was 26 years old. After than, he was just a cantankerous old coot whining that "God doesn't play dice".
Maybe cut out some of the silly grants, the ones you see all the time like why Popsicle's melt in July, and why water freezes in Alaska or the sexual habits of some silly fly. How about REAL needed grants and cut out some of the silly crap.
As a young scientist who just completed my Ph.D. at age 34 I am choosing to leave academia due to funding, or lack there of... Nothing is as infuriating as seeing my friends who chose to attend medical school and have now completed their residency programs start with $300k salaries whereas I've contributed to my field, made discoveries, and published papers only to be expected to take an indefinitely long postdoctoral fellowship for $40,000/yr. We are losing the best and brightest and their lines of research, I am one of them.
Just another aspect of our risk averse society. It's a lot less risky to give a grant to an established scientist with a history of unexciting results than to take a chance on a young scientist who has mostly been third or fourth author behind the guys who run the laboratory and has no track record.
This is exacerbated by the fact that many of the grant awarding bodies are now run by aging scientists with a substantial institutions of their own which needs grants to support them. So they have a strong vested interest in maintaining the cashflow to large research groups rather than encouraging direct competitors.
The science job system is broken. The main problem is the federal subsidy of Graduate Student Stipends and Postdoctoral Fellowship salaries from grants. This has led to the situation of an oversupply of bright people in what amount to full time jobs with no benefits with little chance to achieve a rare faculty post. The fix is to stop the subsidy. Institutions need to take on fewer graduate students, pay them more and train them fully. Bolster the Master's degree for the less committed. The Postdoc should be eliminated and replaced with the term Contract Researcher which should be treated like a job. These people should be paid market rates so they can move to whomever is smart enough to get a grant.
For the kids out there, the current system is a sort of feudal concoction built to maximize imperious egos and is fundamentally exploitive.
Advise: go into science if you have the desire. Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO.
It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.
Colleges and Universities compete with one another for grant getting researchers as much as they do for enrollment. From my vantage point, college today is big business with posh offerings for both faculty and students while being short on rigor and learning. What the article doesn't say is that there are more grants available now than at any time. The fact that older researchers are getting them may point to the fact that young people simply aren't being trained in grant writing techniques or they are being sucked up by corporations that need them and don't need to apply for grants. Obviously a person who wants to do research is someone that can think and they seem to be few and far between these days, even with a four year degree.
The congress is full of evolution/climate-change denying anti-science cretins. They are the ones who ultimately sign the checks for science funding. What else did we expect? Science is dead in this country. Welcome to the dark ages.
I just got a fairly substantial grant for a project from an external agency. However, as things stand, on this project I will not be the PI (primary investigator ) - that will be our head of dept. So why do I call it my grant? Because I wrote the proposal, handled all interactions with the funding agency, wrote the budget and arranged everything. My boss simply signed on a dotted line and shook a few hands. A symptom of the endless cycle of postdocs is that you don't have a permanent post until you're quite far on in your career. Therefore your own institution won't let you be the PI. The way around it is that you get a figurehead to be in charge, but you really end up running things.
This has its advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is that you tend to have a fairly heavy hitter politically to back you up. He (and it's so often He that it's an insult to my female colleagues to pretend that they are equally represented) should have your back in exchange for drawing a fraction of his salary from your grant. The disadvantages are that you aren't officially PI for the sake of your CV - when you apply for jobs you are asked "Wasn't that X's grant?" when you talk about it - an it doesn't count as much for you. Likewise, they pay is miniscule. One of the things you learn writing a budget is just how much more a senior academic makes than a postdoc. It's depressing both how large the ratio is, and how relatively low the higher figure actually is.
Of course the whole process is a vicious cycle: You can't be PI, so you don't have PI positions on grants on your CV, so you have a hard time getting a permanent job, and so you can't be a PI... You just spend three of four months working on a proposal, sacrifice your dignity to the gods of the funding agency, ask someone else to take 90% of the credit, and prepare for hard work. On the plus side, you might just get paid enough to live and do what you love.
Couldn't this also be worded, "The decline in scientists: Young scientists fail to win grants. Older scientists taking in lion's share."
This is a direct result of voting Republican.
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't that cut into sports team funding?
Does Johns Hopkins have a sports team? I don't know.
As for other schools, sports teams is what generates the money coming in. That's why the coaches get paid millions of dollars per year, athletically talented kids are brought in on a free ride regardless of their academic talents and those kids are then exploited at all levels - the NCAA should be sued.
Make all the young researchers play football.
It happens in both directions. There is a "Goldilocks age" of between about 7 to 17 years of experience (varies per industry). If you are young, the profiling is that you don't have enough practical experience; and if you are old, the profiling is that you don't adapt to new technologies and trends.
When the economy is tight and international competition strong, then companies can pick and choose who they hire, and they prefer the Goldilocks age range.
The profiling may not be accurate for any given individual, but as a short-cut under pressure, hiring profiling happens.
Table-ized A.I.
Scientists typically do their most creative work before the age of forty. With the average age of grant recipients being over 45, I'd expect to see a drop off in breakthroughs.
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Ha!
I do believe he was working in the patent office at the time or thereabouts. He was looking for a job in academia if I remember the documentary correctly. Not quite the QuickieMart, but not really in his degree area either.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Back when people rode horses relatively few people did it. In the 1870s US, the cost to keep a horse in stable would cost almost a third of a typical laborer's daily wage ($0.50 out of $1.75), most of which was already spoken for.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I didn't have a problem getting money in academia in my late 20s, for engineering. However, I did have a problem with the current focus on bean counting. A couple of high impact papers---hence not having a problem getting money---are worthless to bean counters, the key phrase being "a couple." Dean-types want to see "a couple dozen," not "a couple," on the annual bean counting documentation. Granted, I left; they didn't force me out. But I didn't want to be there.
Whatever. I make 2.5x the salary in industry and don't have to deal with unmotivated students. I do miss the motivated ones, though.
Back when I was in school (1980's), the NSF recognized this problem and had a special grant ("NSF Young Investigator Award") that would issue small to medium sized grants to faculty under a certain age. I took a quick spin on Google, couldn't tell if the program (or something similar) still exists. Even though the grants weren't large, it enabled junior faculty to get a "Principle Investigator" line on their CV, hopefully enabling future funding.
This is really driven by the glut of postdocs. With half a dozen post docs per professorial position, there's no surprise that the average age of the professors is creeping up, and therefore the average age of the PI is creeping up.
Since a majority of biological scientists are women, we just need to spin up the feminist machine and the grant money will flow.
See, with more women in the roles of running labs, women will become the majority of biological scientists.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014...
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
The same forces at work in academia apply in industry. Not only is the extremely lean development team starving its future members at college, it is doing so in other places where the president can make $4 million/year while the basic worker makes $4 thousand/year.
Until leaders operate with vision, as they once did, we will continue cannibalizing the future of our nation and species so the millionaires clubbers of the world can have another yacht.
It's amusing that academics complain about the salary differentials in the private sector, then do the same thing in their universities. Change yourself first, then agitate for change in the outside world.
If you aren't willing to eat your own dog food why are you trying to get someone else to eat it?
No, not really. The vast majority of Division I schools lose money on athletics, none of the Division III schools cover their athletic expenses.
from http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
"Just 23 of 228 athletics departments at NCAA Division I public schools generated enough money on their own to cover their expenses in 2012. Of that group, 16 also received some type of subsidy — and 10 of those 16 athletics departments received more subsidy money in 2012 than they did in 2011."
Sports provides valuable marketing (for the top schools), and that has value, but don't kid yourself that sports is generating net revenue.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This was inevitable when large portions of GDP are diverted to supporting non-productivity (i.e.: welfare, Obama phones, food stamps, illegal aliens,etc). When government spending was a more comfortable percentage of GDP, government had more money available to seed research. Companies with lower tax burdens could also fund long term research that might or might not produce marketable products.
A good friend is a genetic researcher at UCSD who now spends ~40% of his time writing grant applications instead of doing science. He says that, ten years ago, the percentage was 10%.
In the physics and engineering proposals I have reviewed, it seems that young researchers still get a significant preference in the distribution of grants. But there is a problem that the proposals from young researchers are often much weaker. It is really hard to write a great grant proposal and new faculty members usually struggle long and hard to get good at it. You have to have great ideas, preliminary work, and a great presentation. And you have to know how to market your ideas to the diverse set of people who will be reviewing the proposal. Maybe 30 years ago, people could get research grants just by describing some potentially interesting research, but in the current environment, you have to write a proposal that is better than 80 or 90% of the others, and that is hard for young people to do. Maybe the bias toward younger researchers should be stronger. But I don't think it helps them to set a low bar and then they will fail to get their grants renewed. I would recommend that grant agencies more aggressively limit the number of grants that can be accumulated by the big names. No one can effectively mentor 5 post-docs and 10 graduate students, and letting them suck up all the funding just because they are able to spit out a large number of strong proposals limits the number of new researchers who can be funded.
Soon they will be able to go back to Community College for free.
Soon they will be able to go back to Community College for free!
A horse was a luxury, as are automobiles and email. blackomegax is simply a spoiled brat, and probably wouldn't live long in a world where he had to actually sustain himself, leaving no time to play with his Xbox. Trying to justify government grants because they provide luxuries is the height of hubris.
But still, it would be interesting to hear his rationalization of how government grants created the automobile or developed penicillin. Ironically, the letters which he so casually dismisses are a government funded service.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Scientists typically do their most creative work before the age of forty.
With the average age of grant recipients being over 45, I'd expect to see a drop off in breakthroughs.
The people actually doing the work are young postdocs. They have poor working conditions because there are too many of them, not because there aren't enough of them. So this particular problem is no problem at all.
Even if they *do* "pay for it" (i.e., free tuition + small stipend as a phd student), it's still a huge opportunity cost -- you could be getting a real job, and making real money.
PhD programs are basically an unsustainable pyramid scheme: become a professor, get lots of grant money to stay employed/receive tenure, hire lots of grad students, make them all PhDs, with the expectation that they will mostly go out and get professor jobs and universities, rinse and repeat.
Right now, we've reached saturation, and nobody really needs any more university professors, not even in STEM/CompSci, etc. You now have the 500 applicants per tenure track job opening, 4 post-docships in a row and still no job prospects, permatemp adjuct instructor positions at lame 40k/year salaries, and so on.
The bubble is in the process of bursting, it was nice while it lasted, great for whomever managed to get tenure, it's going to suck for everyone but a few brilliant (at self promotion) people.
The NSF budget has gone from $3.2 Billion in 1998 to $7.1 Billion in 2014. A bigger issue might be that demographics of native born Americans shows there are many more 40 somethings than 20 somethings. America is making up this deficet of young people by allowing a lot of immigration. The possibility is that many 1st or 2nd generation immigrants are not taking enough school to become researchers.
Right wing governments corrupt democracy to further their religious goals, one of which is the elimination of science. Math is hard.
I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)
From the Goodstein article:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
5 postdocs per research position is great, compared to the number of potential candidates per tenure-track professor position. Getting rid of people at the postdoc stage means they're not stringing them along pretending there's an upward career track in academia, and means they'll be less tempted to take an adjunct job while waiting for the real thing. (And yes, it sucks.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I got free health insurance and several minor fringe benefits in graduate school. As a postdoc, I get a number of subsidized benefits. The details of the benefits vary from program to program. The thing that early career scientists do not get in my experience is a retirement benefit. Graduate students also do not get social security.
Simon's Rock College
>By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. ..
and people act like science in some male dominated boys club
Stop the bullshit, these schools are not altruistic. Universities are money making operations, and large bureaucracies that make select people truckloads of money. Look at UC who has "Reagents" who make million dollar salaries, Vice Reagents who make half million dollar salaries, and assistant vice reagents who make just under half million dollar salaries (none of these include "travel" and other "expenses" that the Tax payers all foot the bill for either). Three people, all buddies of someone else in the community, all cashing in for 1 goddamn position. Oh, but Unions are disallowed because a professor is not in the same social structure so can't make as much money as the "executive" and "administrators" for college. No University in the US is different, you just have different titles than "reagent".
Considering that penicillin came out of gov. Funded academia, and I.C.E. theory also came from centuries of academia theory, I think he would have an easy time doing so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
In my opinion, if Medicare and Social Security were available to all from birth, the USA would be a much happier and fairer society.
Your point on doctors for the elderly connects with my previous post here mentioning Philip Greenspun's writing on why women avoid academic science careers.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
Still, even given that, the fact is that we spend very little on medical research relative to the total amount we spend on medicine. If we spent, say, 20% of our US$2+ trillion annual medical budget on medical research, that would be US$400 billion a year, which is a lot of researchers. Likely such an investment would be tremendously cost-effective at avoiding costs. But we spend about 4%, and much of that is on "me too" drugs, like a fifth version of Viagra or whatever.
http://www.researchamerica.org...
BTW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"A major flaw and vulnerability in biomedical research appears to be the hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science. The competition seems to suppress the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries. Other consequences of today's highly pressured environment for research appear to be a substantial number of research publications whose results cannot be replicated, and perverse incentives in research funding that encourage grantee institutions to grow without making sufficient investments in their own faculty and facilities. Other risky trends include a decline in the share of key research grants going to younger scientists, as well as a steady rise in the age at which investigators receive their first funding."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I am an Assistant Prof at a tier one research univ and reading this depressed the hell out of me.
Oh well, back to work!
One thing any scientist can do is to find a way to commercialize their work and start it up in biotech. One of the greatest problems I see in academia is the overabundance of scientists who believe they should be paid by public funds to pursue basic research. The public is not increasing funding exponentially, but the growth of scientists expecting to move toward instead of outward is exponential.
We can count on business to pay for good candidates of scientific work, but it's a humbling transition that many academics aren't prepared to make.
While I agree with half of your premise, we have two distinct sides of the coin when discussing the information age. First is that technology has advance where we are generating a ton of information. The bad side is dissemination and filtering out the crap. So much of our current technology is going into not just storing the crap, but filtering the crap and dumping the good.
Theoretically speaking however, you are giving the shaft to everything we do today. Sure, we could go back to the hand plow, spinning wheels and looms and fuck all technology. Would society be better off this way? Not in my opinion, but.. the technology should be working to improve society as a whole and not generate massive wealth for very few (as has been happening for a long time and getting exponentially worse over the last 3 or so decades.
Perhaps building your career around a model that assumes that someone will simply give you money to do what you want is a foolish choice? Is it unsurprising in a country that is trillions of dollars in debt, that there seems to be less interest in continuing to do that?
There's however a reasonably successful model close to that, where they give you money to do what THEY want - it's called a JOB. Of course, then there are things like expectations and consequences if you don't, usually stopping the flow of money.
"Next up on Slashdot: complaining about the corporatization of science!"
-Styopa
In the 60's all you needed for brain drain was a six pack and a lid. Now get off my lawn!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The article is interesting but leaves me asking more questions than it answers.
It can be taken as a given that as time and scientific progress marches forward there is more to learn to be at the cutting edge of research, however it can also be said that academia is not doing it's job if one generation of researchers is not able to adequately build on the learning of previous generations. It is also a given (alluded to by prominent markings of the site hosting the article) that research is a business and the article implies that since 1980 younger researchers are not as successful at wining grants. This begs the question, is this due to a general lack of research money or is it due to a preference for more experienced researchers in general? If the latter is the cause then what is the root cause? Is it a drop in the quality of education of the researchers or is it a more specific problem along the lines of the younger researchers not being as good at writing successful research grant proposals?
If that last bit is true, then what we might be looking at is a question of marketing and or a general problem with the "Brand" represented by generations of researchers. The general trend that has developed in the private sector since the 1980s has seemed to favor certain qualities, and I wonder if these qualities are lacking in the educational training of younger researchers when looking for grants. These qualities are:
1- Being the first to research or develop a thing (Being ahead of the competition, asking the right questions)
2- Being the best at researching or developing a thing and or (Having better pre-research steps documented and communicated clearly as the 0th step in the scientific method process, I.E. Doing one's homework.)
3- Being the one with the biggest track record of success in comparison to the competition. (Older researchers would naturally have an advantage here, though it does not imply that this is necessarily always the case)
The only given that is clear here other than these 3 factors is that the scientific community is and always has been fiercely competitive. It is often the case, looking at history that scientists who have been on the right track early on sometimes are not well regarded by their peers without a sea change in the paradigm in some fields and history is full of examples. (Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis is an example of this which is prominent in my mind.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis) It can also be said that that last point is not a universal and there are tons of "researchers" who are not on the right track to varying degrees from simply pursuing dead ends to those who are straight up con artists just chasing money and producing nothing. One usual red flag of the worst cases of the latter are those that say they are pursuing something amazing that will change the world, but they have been discredited by profit minded individuals who have a financial interest in keeping the status quo where it is. This is a warning flag because one has to be VERY CAREFUL to judge which party is the one chasing money and which is actually pursuing something novel and worthy of research grants.
I would welcome a study that pursues the question: On average, since 1980 what is the root cause of the shift in research money going to older researchers, and what can be done to level the playing field? This is an onion that, if peeled apart correctly, could allow academia to make changes in it's approach such that more quality research can be done more cheaply and faster, resulting in a greater return on investment per research dollar on average. This is not something that can just be answered anecdotally and left at that.
Telling lies won't convince anyone. Fleming worked for St. Mary's, which was founded as and still was a voluntary hospital (funded by private philanthropy) at the time.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Oh and the jet engine was developed on government money too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ha ha, and Hollywood movies operate at a loss...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Fleming worked at st Mary' medical school, which was distinctly separate from the hospital. And without gov support, st Mary' hospital and med school, never would have happened.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Telling lies won't convince anyone.
Maybe you should follow your own advice then. Fleming was a professor at the University of London at the same time that he was working at St. Mary's, and it was in this capacity that he was conducting the research.
No offense but if you are adjuncting, the writing has long since been on the wall--you're not going to make it in your field. It may be that you aren't good enough, it may be that you didn't get the opportunity to shine because there wasn't funding to get a position when you were graduating, it may be you didn't get a fair shake as a postdoc, whatever--but in tough times and in good times, the cream of the crop rise, and if you're adjuncting, you're statistically likely to not be one of those. The consolation prize is still pretty good though, to be a PhD holder in a research field (not clear what field you are) you should be able to get a reasonable STEM job somewhere, unless you are also bound by the geography/two-body problem, which can also be a reason for bitching about adjuncting.
As a modestly successful mid-30s phd doing the postdoc grind at a national lab, I will entirely agree that it is a pyramid scheme. The sad truth of it is that there is not enough funding and there WILL NEVER BE enough funding to give scientist/professor jobs to everyone who graduates with a PhD in a STEM field--even to the 'good' people. That guarantees a pyramid scheme problem. Couple that with tenure being a ~30+ year appointment to a job, making turnover minimal while graduation remains annual.
The other side of the problem though is that at most R1 universities in the US, graduate students are mostly coddled by their advisors and other faculty--generally the only people they have to take career advice from are the 1 in 100 who landed faculty jobs, who generally are a generation (or more) older, when things were much simpler--these are often the worst possible people to take career advice from.
One problem that I didn't anticipate earlier in my career that I woefully see now is the fact that STEM graduate schools educate anyone remotely qualified to be there, not only just the best and brightest. Sure, at Harvard (or wherever major-R1 you want to name) basically everyone is brilliant, but there are oh, 100+ other PhD granting institutes in every field that *also* have a full crop of graduate students who get government-subsidized stipends to go to school with the same foolish expectations that it will work out for them just as well as the guys at harvard! So I shudder but I agree that graduate schools seriously need to severely restrict the number of people they accept--even if this would cause a short-term chaos in research and in TA appointments.
Last thing; the OP really made me kind of chuckle--are there that many people who are deluded enough to go to STEM graduate school where they have to pay tuition? I'm not lighting the world on fire with my research career by any means, but the only people I have worked with/met/etc that paid to get a phys/chem/bio/math masters degree (*engineering is different) should never have gone on to graduate school for fairly obvious reasons.
But they can earn 3x as much by going into the non-academic private sector and doing their research for profit-driven corps that will patent and secret the hell out of it, rather than using it for the good of all. Because the general public doesn't want to own the essential everyday technologies of the future; they'd rather it be kept inside high corporate walls and be forced to pay through the nose for it to wealthy billionaires.
And because bright young researchers actually have to eat, and actually want a life, they grudingly go where the money is, knowing full well they're contributing to deep social problems to come. Myself included.
But why would I settle for a string of one-year postdoc contracts that pay like entry-level jobs and require superhuman hours and commitment when I can go earn six figures at a proper nine-to-five, with revenue sharing, great benefits, and job security? Yes, the company owns everything I do. But I get to pay my bills and build a personal future. Of course, society's future is much dimmer as the result of so many people making the same choice that I have, and so much good work ending up in private hands rather than public ones.
But them's the beans. If you want to own the future, public, you've got to be willing to pay for it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The US highway system enabled the mass adoption of the automobile, and was entirely or largely federally funded. BAM.
You say that as if it's a good thing. The railroads, which were privately funded, happened much sooner, and with greater positive effect.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law