I am a PhD student in medical research with years of experience as a Technical Officer and Research Assistant, and the bleak reality of my future career prospects is really hitting home for me right now.

I’m sitting here trying desperately to decide what my ‘plan B’ is because science is not it. I’ve done the research, and I’m not going to continue being the super-qualified cheap labour with no job security and be discriminated against just because I want to have a family one day and heck, even a superannuation to retire on.

So my problem is that I have all this science training and qualifications and I’m struggling to find an alternative career. I am subsisting on a student research stipend that I can’t give-up without another source of income, so I will probably be maintaining the facade of PhD student until I have an alternative.

And to those who haven’t tread these planks, employers are not receptive to us ‘over-qualified’ science surplus. I’d flip burgers if someone would pay me to, but they’d rather hire a kid.

Postdoc deluding themselves or not, these remained to be answered:

1. Why allow overproduction of PhDs in the first place knowing very well that oversupply cheapens the commodity.

2.Why is postdoc (long postdocs) encouraged and condoned when it was unnecessary 40 yrs ago when the current crops of senior scientist were less confident, less well-equipped and less well-trained. They ‘got there’ bcos the system gave them time to develop and make their mistakes; gave them opportunity to obtain grants on untested ideas. If the current system is such that ‘many (current PhDs) have deluded themselves into thinking that they are good at what they do (i.e., bench science). Many have achieved success by blindly going through the hoops–good undergrad GPA, grad school, thesis defense’, then there is a major problem and they system needs complete overhauling.At least we know the in other professions the training are not carried out that way. So the point still stands: Science PhD degree is FAULTY. It needs fixing’

Unless this is addressed, we are in danger of losing a whole generation of highly trained scientist (which if carefully considered, is necessary, for PhD to regain its rightful place).

3. If you set your hours as a postdoc, why are the hours very long and the pay low? I have been in labs where after a postdoc commits 12 hr/d, the supervisor was not convinced and wants him/her to got for 15. Remember, there were no overtime payment and no incentives. Even the postdoc was not allowed to travel home during Christmas to see aging parents after having slaved away for 3 yrs in this lab. Isn’t that what the ILO is busy fighting in Asia & Africa, yet it is happening to PhD holders right there in America. An abuser only produces an abuser. It is not a surprise then that the desire for science in the Western society is waning.

This info is clearly stated in the link provided in the article, and here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080319/full/452258a.html

This info doesn’t alter the main point of the article, but it does suggest sloppy journalism.

On a separate point, most post-docs know that the pay sucks before applying, and they also know that there’s little chance for obtaining a faculty job. Yet they become post-docs anyway. Why? Some love the work or lifestyle (set your own hours, etc.) But far too many have deluded themselves into thinking that they are good at what they do (i.e., bench science). Many have achieved success by blindly going through the hoops–good undergrad GPA, grad school, thesis defense–but one isn’t truly independent until the post-doc stage. And that’s usually when PhDs find out if they are good at doing science or not.

Today you are given a project by your supervisor, publish under his name and must continue to be associated with him/her to ensure your career success (especially for a postdoc). There is very little room to be audacious and do something uniquely different as the systems is so risk-averse. Any inkling of you going your own way or competing with your supervisor is met with instant ‘career murder’ (anyone who’s been there will understand what I mean). A brilliant young scientist cannot survive under the current system unless you stick close to the ‘big guys’, never challenge them, and learn the ‘dog-eat-dog’ of ’snuffing life off’ your potential competitors early (who unfortunately are other young scientists like you equally looking for career success but working for ‘a smaller guy’). I talk from personal experience. The whole system is to ensure that only the very successful guys and their labs continue to be successful and the ’strugglers’ continue to suffer. That way the ‘little people’ quit and leave the field altogether for big players.
Unlike business, law, commerce etc where graduates are prepared to take on real life problems through a well rounded training, senior scientists effectively lock their trainees up in the lab for 12-15 hr/day, offer them only one type of training which is to become so good only at doing experiments, and ensure that the only professional contacts they have is with limited-focus scientists like themselves in seminar and conferences, and NOTHING ELSE. Infact, when you examine it closely, many of the top scientists are poor managers and possess poor people skills. The only place they can thrive is the university where it is possible to hide under the cloud of the protection of their professorial titles. No wonder that no enterprise outside of the academia wants scientists even though they know we are smart and intelligent. That is why the hours are long, pay is low and you end up having not meaningful life in science. For instance the rate of men and women without children/family or those having children at very old age is disproportionately higher among scientists. Yet, you are asking young scientists to go to schools to encourage kids to consider science as a career. Who is the system fooling?

The message is clear: Science PhD degree is FAULTY. It needs fixing else the trend of young people turning away from science is just beginning!

“All Science is done in private industry”. “Academia produces nothing”.

I said, Name one fundamental discovery that came from industry, and not from academia.”

( U was hoping that he would say ” The transistor”, because all three types wee actually patented by a part-time academic two decades before Bell Labs “reinvented it”. )

After a few moments of thought, his face turned white and he left in an upset state.

“You expect lifetime job security?”

“And you are complaining that your chance is only seven percent?”

The public will say:
OF course, I saw them on Star Trek.

Any physicist will say:
Of course, the laws of nature are not unique to our solar system, so planets were expected to be there.

A perverse senator might say:

All that money to prove an expected conclusion?

Most members of the general public will say:
And, how does this improve my life?

Again: Form a strong union.

// Overall cancer survivor rates: For cancers diagnosed from 1974 to 1976, the five-year survival rate was 50 percent. Between 1995 and 2001, the latest five-year survival rate data, the survival rate was 65 percent.
//

( One might ask how much is due to early detection, and how much of that is due to medical research of the last thirty years and not to
more attention to screening and the MRI?)

So, I will change my earlier comment ( of a general public perspective):

” All those billions for three decades on academic cancer research, and we have only gone from 50 to 65 percent survival?” ” And is that really due to gains in research–which i have paid my tax dollars for
?”

I don’t see any significant medical applications that have come out of all the billions spent in the last thirty years on “Medical Research”.
I see lots of predictions: stem cells, telomeres, etc. But, meanwhile we are seeing the same classes of antibiotics ( losing their effectiveness), the same chemotherapy poisons ( Cancer death rates are not improved) etc,

MRi doesn’t count as that was just engineering after I.Rabi first measured the MRI effect, and Radon did the math. Both were well before the thirty year cutoff above.

Moreover, the statistics of most of the medical research are so badly done that the studies keep contradicting each other. They are done by
–at best–PHD biostatistics people–who don’t have the understanding of the theoretical underpinning of statistics that a MATH PHD in statistics does. ( I know you biostatistics people will scream, but I am correct here: the NSF has shown over and over again that over 90% of the statistics in medical papers –in fact, in biology papers–is incompetently done.) What the general public sees is a constant barrage of news reports that contradict each other and lead to total distrust of medical research: E.g. “Eggs are bad for you, they cause heart disease”, “Eggs are fine, they don’t cause heart disease”; “Estrogen prevents heart disease”, “Estrogen causes Heart Disease, “Estrogen is maybe safe?”.

So, why should we concerned that postdocs in medical research don’t have careers. Maybe, we should shut down the whole thing, until it
cleans up its act?

Physics research: Except for a few applied backwaters like optical
nanomaterials,and Bose-Einstein condensates–physics research has produced NOTHING of any significance in the last thirty years. Most of the last generation of researchers has gone into string theory–a theory with no experimental underpinnings, which has the feel of medieval scholasticism ( How many type II heterostrings fit into the energy range of [a,b] in a pinhead sized mini-black hole in eleven dimensions?) How many billions have we spent on physics?

Astronomy: ( results claimed by astrophysics): So called dark-energy,
which is probably just Einstein’s cosmological constant in play. So called Dark Matter–for which the current “explanations” are the above science fiction. Very exciting–but how many billions have we spent on this field and its space telescopes etc? How much have we actually learned about Dark Matter–( Nothing). Applications to society–Nil.

Pure Math: Solved major conjectures of the last century–like the Poincare conjecture, and Fermat’s last theorem. Does the paying public care about hometopy types of sphers or sums of powers of integers? Nope. But, math—suffering from the worst grant funding of all of these fields–and for far longer–is very inexpensive.

Chemistry: No significant new development from academic chemistry in the last thirty years–by what I mean something like the invention of polymers ( aka plastics) or organic chemistry, or synthetic dyes, –which spawned trillion dollar industries. Whatever happened to the promise of Laser chemistry?

Ome could go on science field by science field. Considered from a general public perspective, or from that of a socially conscious congressman–it is a miracle that academic science is getting ANY funding at all.

How many billions wasted on chemistry?

Now, if we had a public fascinated by understanding the universe, with the economic resources to spend on that, and if the sciences cleaned up their act ( and we all know about the abuses in research)
it would be different. But, basically, we should get down on our knees and kiss the floor every day that we are supported to do science at all.

Now, someone who spends 45 years of their life as a science student
and then as a researcher and then has to change fields:

From the perspective of the general public–who often have to change jobs and career fields several times in a lifetime, these postdocs are basically Whiners. At least the science geeks got to work at something they liked to do for half their life–for which they take an economic hit ( like someone who would rather be a low paid librarian then a highly paid truck driver). WHat are these nerds complaining about?

Want a society where scientists get good jobs, proper treatment?
Then follow what your intellectual and educational “inferiors”–the truck drivers did–create something like the teamsters–and Strike, Strike, Strike–shut down critical engineering based industries etc.
( Are their any industries that are actually science based–not engineering based–I mean right now, not in the ” We will invent a new tech, then new products” sense.”?) If not, then fall in with the engineers who view themselves to be underpaid etc.

Whining for government help is not effective, Start a STRONG union.

Unfortunately, I know many cases for whom the decision to quit was too late and now some of them are flipping burgers with impressive records of more than 30 papers each in journals with IF ranked among the top 10% of their areas. Get advice, I mean real guidance and info about these chopping factories of young-human flesh aka the universities and their slave-driving science departments. Dont get pissed of, neither ripped off by these professors who promise everything to keep you working on THEIR own projects. Postdoc have become bargains, taking over the role of the technicians more expensive. It could be fine spending 1 or 2 years as postdoc, as it used to be in the old times, extend it longer will wreck your life entirely. Dont trust anybody in this false world. Above all, be honest, dont cheat yourself.

What his writing underlies is that even this high and mighty NIH director knows the problem of the young scientists, especially the postdoctorall fellows. But yet, he has not taken neccessary measures to help improve the current NIH funding system. This area is grossly/largely ignored or deliberately let loose without much restructuring.

The whole academia or higher education system in USA needs a careful reorganization, otherwise what you see will continue, a single faculty of 65 or 70 years old will have all the funding available and sit on it for years until his/her dementic brain kills all the funding with as many as 32 grants (MOST OUTRAGEOUS DISPARITY) and our most valuable and efficient young scientists will be struggling to meet the ends between the academia, lab and their family committments.

What our current academic policies and atmosphere does is to chase the potential young scientists out of labs. Why blame these youngsters if they seek green pasteurs elsewhere like a “biotech job or an industry job”, they have no choice than to look elsewhere for their future.

Any school that grants PhDs without a functional knowledge of one or more allied fields (business, law, policy, communications, K-12 education) has scammed its students and left them crippled and unprepared for the career realities ahead.

Three quick points. 1) This problem extends far beyond the biomedical field. It perhaps appears more dramatic there because of the big increase in funding that occurred at the turn of the century, but it is systemic throughout science. In fact it is my experience that some of the fields that didn’t see the big increase have had this problem going on 20 years now. 2) This is not the “plight of the postdoc”, but the plight of a generation of scientists. Witness – “the average age of a firt-time awardee is 43.” There is a lost generation of scientists and opportunity in this country. 3) As Sheril is aware and has worked to point out, things like this tend to affect women disproportionally, driving them out of the field at a time when we need all the talent we can get. If women didn’t make the rational decision (based on the environment) to leave the field after ten years we wouldn’t have a shortage.

Second, we need a broader outreach to Americans about what science does. Many Americans would be shocked to know science underlies traffic control, or bridge construction, or even the operations of the rescue squad that saved their uncle from a heart attack. If you show American, clearly and concisely, how science works in their lives, I suspect they will start demanding more science funding.