Maxine was quick on the draw to attract attention to the meritorious article and accompanying, welcome editorial on how ill-conceived funding strategies break scientists’ lives. I could empathize well with the plights of the two people who illustrated it.

My opinion is that this is a timely discussion around Darwin’s birth, once again. Getting funded, even excellent work, is a good number of parts effort and quality, and a few parts being in the right place at the right time. Like science itself. As unfortunate as it is to be one of the laissées pour compte, the abandoned at the wayside, it’s always been part of the process as long as I’ve been aware of it. It’s far easier of course when you have tenure, and can hope to struggle back into the fray after a brief hiatus and with departmental support. But layoffs and killing your mice stocks are not a lot more fun than looking for a new career altogether.

Of course it’s obvious that there was unfortunate timing for both women chosen as examples with respect to their personal lives and that impacted on their professional development right at that time. I know of a man who was in a similar position to Rafael-Fortney except that his impact moment was going through a painful divorce from his very successful scientist-wife. He ended up leaving his prestigious university after not being offered tenure, and is now happily married to someone else, with at least one kid, and works as a senior manager at a respected bioscience supplier. I hope he is happy now (have just conducted a brief web search to track him down and send a “how are you after 14 years?” message), but I know he was very bitter about it all at the time. As I would have been, because I am certainly no smarter than him.

The larger picture plagues all countries now. How can a government which will last for only a short term draw a consistent “roadmap” that will enable steady, not fluctuating, support for the sciences, and that can damp down these destructive oscillations? On the other hand, is there an incentive for a government to do so? The sciences seem to bounce back one way or another, even when individual lives and ambitions are destroyed. Science policy has been all about trial and a fair bit about error as well, around the world.

At SciBlog 2008 (note that, Bob!) Jennifer made a fairly controversial comment during her panel, and followed up with a blog post, which was exactly along the lines of:

The career crisis is especially stark in the biomedical fields, where the number of tenure-track and tenured positions has not increased in the past two decades even as universities have nearly doubled their production of biomedical doctorates.

Jennifer and I both came out of that wealthy, world-envied American biological research education system. This is the flagrant downside of it, but of course it exists in less wealthy (but not less ambitious) systems. Such as the French system with which I live.

Who decides what research priorities should be? How directed can be research that could take two or twenty years to bear fruit? Should governments restrict the number of Ph.D. slots to something that better resembles the demand that they will be able to finance later? I can attest that France, and apparently Italy, just waits for potential young scientists to grow disgusted of their own accord at the lack of prospects, putting in place a true policy of (un)natural selection for only the most stubborn and/or deluded. How can mere humans live their lives with an unreliable system of patronage to sponsor them?

Many thanks to Mr. Darwin for his consolatory words.