Crisis of confidence in scientific careers
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 05 February 2009 18:13 UTC
The battle to keep a lab funded can be long and painful. Meredith Wadman meets two researchers who may be close to hanging up their coats in a Nature news feature this week, free to access online for a limited time (Nature 457, 650-655; 2009). An accompanying Editorial (free to access online) opines that “With a surfeit of graduates for the available funds, the US scientific endeavour is increasingly losing its lustre as a career choice. The country needs to take stock and plan more carefully for the future.” (Nature 457, 635; 2009). “The reality is that neither the United States nor any other nation knows how to calculate the number of scientists and engineers it currently needs, let alone how many it will require in the future. But at the moment, some signs suggest that the United States may have a surplus.” The Editorial has harsh words to say about the scientific leadership, which it says focuses only on numbers and fails to see individuals who write the grant proposals, conduct the research and struggle to keep their careers afloat. What do you think?
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Hi Maxine
The situation in the US may not be as good as it once was… but it’s still a big step ahead of the nightmare we face in Australia. I’m not sure of the current numbers but the last report I saw put total R&D spending in Australia (as a % of GDP) at around half that of the US and UK. Our biomedical fellowship scheme is top-heavy and backlogged to the point that the awards designed to support new PIs go mostly to well established group leaders.
A recent survey of the medical research workforce in Australia highlighted the level of anxiety and discontent over poor career development opportunities and lack of funding. For example, in the last 5 years 6% of respondents had left active research and 73% had considered leaving.
I moved to Canada for a couple of years to gain some overseas experience in an attempt to boost my CV but the prospects for returning back home are grim to say the least.
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The other thing to consider about having such low success rates in funding is the sheer inefficiency of the situation. My non-scientist friends shake their heads in disbelief at the time spent writing proposals relative to funding received… as opposed to actually doing research.
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That’s grim to read about, Darren. And from what I’ve been reading on Nature Network and elsewhere recently about Canadian research funding, things are none too good there either.
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Maxine, I was very impressed by this tandem when I read it yesterday – I had left the tabs open to make some comments on them and advertise the pieces in my blog – but you and Charles Darwin and perhaps others beat me to it. Still, I wrote a long enough comment that I did make it into a post.
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Thanks, Heather, I will read your post (via my RSS reader) when I get to that, later today or this evening – thanks for the heads-up.
The news and features editors here are keen to know what readers think of the news feature (as well as encouraging people to say what they think about the contents!). It is relatively unusual for us to run such a personal piece, and also such a long piece. Do readers like it? Would they want more of the same? I will pass back to them any feedback that Nature Network users would like to provide, here. Many thanks.
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The Nature article is fairly emotive, which is easier to achieve when discussing research in medicine or experiments involving animals. However, reduced funding levels and increased competition among a larger body of active researchers also affects other fields and countries. In the UK, those of us who use the EPSRC for funding have witnessed a similar story with a smaller fraction of assessed grants being funded until we reach the stage where there is for all practical purposes a lottery to determine which of the excellent proposals will be successful.
The amount of money available for curiosity driven research is also decreasing because government seeks to steer funding into areas of political priority. The response from the scientific community is of course to become more inventive as to the potential applications of a given proposal. Personally I find the best way to maintain research activity is through diversity in both sources of funding and topic. It would appear from the Nature article, that undue weight is given to NIH funding (as opposed to general funding) in many US institutions as a requirement for tenure/promotion.
However, despite the disappointment in not getting funding to maintain activity or research group size to a desired level, we academics should recognize our privileged tenured position in times of economic hardship.
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Thanks for your wise comments, Brian. I popped back here to post a link to a Nature news story in the same issue about Candadian research. Not good news I am afraid.
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Sorry, make that ‘Canadian’.
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And to top it all, just this morning, I read in an email from the ScienceDebate2008 campaign, “…efforts underway this morning to zero out a large portion of the science funding from the Senate American Reinvestment and Recovery Act as a part of a $77.9B reduction effort led by Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME).”
They quoted talkingpointsmemo.com which has a transcript of the bill proposal, about what is being proposed to be cut from the bill:
NASA exploration $750,000,000 = 50%
NSF $1,402,000,000 = 100%
NOAA $427,000,000 = 34.94%
NIST $218,000,000 = 37.91%
DOE energy efficiency & renewable energy $1,000,000,000 = 38%
DOE office of science $100,000,000 = 100%Am I being paranoid, or is this a situation going from bad to worse? No wonder there is a crisis of confidence in science careers!
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Someone told me that it is not that NSF’s and DOEOoS’s normal budget is being cut, just the extra addition through the stimulus bill. Perhaps someone here would also say the same. My question is: after the last 8 years’ travesty, aren’t scientific research, science education and teaching, and science curricula in schools in dire need of a positive stimulus as well?
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