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
just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the Nature News Feature article you were discussing about.
As a second year PhD student I don’t often have the opportunity to get an insight into PIs’ lives, but I often wonder how many problems and/or rewards a scientific career brings. In addition it’s useful to get an insight into the reality of another lab, as the reality of my lab might be different from the general situation in the rest of the country or outside it.
So thank you very much. Will be waiting for the next one! -
The current financial crisis is putting a lot of the early-career scientists in a complicated situation. I agree with the editorial that “doctoral programmes should build better career counselling and training into their curricula from the start”. However, I also believe that universities cannot continue to expect professors to do research, apply for grants, patents, and teach altogether. People that have chosen an academic career often do it for the freedom of research, a freedom that encourages creativity. Yet, burdened with administrative tasks, their creativity is hardly used. Why wouldn’t there be a grant writing office ? People that would know about all of the grants, how they would apply to specific research topics and what content would be needed ? Unless it already exists ? From my experience (Uf and Mcgill), I haven’t heard of anything like that.
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Along the same lines of this discussion, this NY Times article looks at another aspect of the current situation
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I always enjoy reading the comments that goes with those articles, especially when the journal is not science-focused. It gives a general idea of how people react to such topics. The comments to the NY article are mainly from academic people, so no real surprise there. But one shocked me. This postdoc mentions that his job search gave the following informal statistics: about 20% of the positions applied got canceled for financial issues. For the rest of them, when given statistics, the number of applicants varied from 150 to 2300 ! The topic popped up again, as my husband ( astrophysicist) got answers that postdoctoral positions in his field were receiving more than 200 applications. I do suspect that academic scientific research has always been competitive, but I feel that the competition level are reaching new heights. Anyone has seen any real data on this ?
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Nature posted an update to this story today:
On 10 February 2009, Darcy Kelley learned that her third and final application for an R01 renewal will be awarded funding by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The same grant had previously been rejected for falling below the 10th percentile. Story Landis, director of the institute, made a decision to move the institute’s funding cut-off for grant applications to the 11th percentile after a re-evaluation of the institute’s funding obligations. The change meant that Kelley — and another 7 investigators whose applications had fallen between the 10th and 11th percentile in two recent funding rounds — got funded.
Small readjustments to funding cut-offs often occur at NIH institutes as the staff monitor how much money is being spent and how much is left. For instance, if enrolment in a costly clinical trial is slower than expected, then spending on the trial in that financial year is reduced, freeing up funds that can be directed to other grants. “The general strategy is that we start off the fiscal year conservatively, setting the payline at a level we are pretty sure we can afford,” says Robert Finkelstein, director of the extramural division at NINDS. As the fiscal year progresses, “we are able to get a little bolder”, he says.
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in my last post, I was wondering about number of applicants for postdoctoral and tenure-track positions. It seems that the NYTimes heard me: Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times. Though the article emphasizes the situation for humanities, I found it quite true for the engineering/health science field.
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Thank you, all, for contributing to this debate. A selection of the above comments, from Darren, Cecile, William and Brian, are published in Correspondence in tomorrow’s issue of Nature, 458, 251; 19 March 2009. A PDF is here; subscription or site licence required .
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