SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe that in recent years, the position of postdoctoral researcher has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank as postdocs are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand. “It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” says Gary McDowell, a 29-year old biologist doing his second postdoc. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.” The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs. This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train from about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 to 56,800 in 2009, flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.
Possible solutions span a wide gamut, from halving the number of postdocs over time, to creating a new tier of staff scientists that would be better paid but one thing people seem to agree on is that simply adding more money to the pot will not by itself solve the oversupply. Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands recently organizing a Future of Research conference in Boston that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change. “How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. “Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:22PM
...for Big Pharma. Or even "Little Pharma" if you can find a VC with some vision.
Set up an incubator-type program. Give lab space, some expense budget, and very modest salaries for small groups of well-trained-but-largely-jobless grad students and post-docs to do research. Use the startup model - their primary compensation is equity in the startup, not salary. Something big comes of it? Buy out the IP (or buy the startup into your research world). Nothing comes of it? Not terribly much ventured.
Being one of 5 co-founders of a tiny biotech startup is a very different life from being in a tenure-track faculty position. But the tenure-track positions aren't there. Best case, if you discover something amazing, and guess what? As the founder of a startup that made a major breakthrough, you're much more attractive if you want to go back to academia.
There are TONS of problems out there that could be solved by new drugs, new treatment techniques, new medical devices. And there's plenty of money out there if we can find effective solutions to some of these problems. Really? We're letting a glut of incredibly highly trained talent rust on the vine because we can't figure out how to make use of them?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:27PM
What would this cost? Any prediction on probability for success per startup?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 10 2014, @09:37PM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:29PM
Yes, and I feel like letting a lot of good talent rust on the vine is a great recipe for revolution and other sorts of disruptive change. Those people, trained and indebted and having worked their asses off to master complex bodies of knowledge, don't simply vanish when they cannot establish themselves in productive careers. They get pissed. And when enough of them with the skills and knowledge to do serious damage build up enough, and get pissed enough, they do. Right now in a basement somewhere somebody among them is working on a way to delete those who are siphoning massive amounts of capital out of our economy and squirrelling it away in the Caymans.
Washington DC delenda est.