

Do Scientists Really Need Ph.D.s? - barry-cotter
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7285/full/464007a.html

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DaniFong
Freeman Dyson on the topic:

[http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/freeman-dyson-on-invention-
an...](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/freeman-dyson-on-invention-and-phds/)

Brand: One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions – it was a
delight to me, and I’ve been quoting it ever since – is that you honor
inventors as much as scientists.

Dyson: It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to
understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great
inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get
Nobel Prizes.

Brand: Is it the scientists who are putting them down?

Dyson: Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic
types.

Brand: Are there other kinds?

Dyson: There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The
academics look down on them, too.

Brand: Is that a weird British hangover?

Dyson: It’s even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide
disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development
there by 2,000 years.

Brand: How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?

Dyson: I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the
evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a
priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs.

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papaf
I'm handing in my PhD thesis tomorrow so this is a well timed question :-)

I have learnt a lot from my studies and feel that I have gained important
skills in attacking problems and evaluating my solutions to them that will be
useful inside and outside of academia. I couldn't have picked up these skills
in the 15 years I spent in industry.

There may be many examples of people who can do great science without a PhD
but for me the experiences of the last 4 years would be essential if I were to
get a job in academia. As it is, I will be going back to programming -- I feel
the academic job market is overly competitive for somebody my age.

------
akadien
No, they need knowledge, creativity, and courage to ask "why?" and "why not?"
A PhD is a firm credential for a job in academia that may or may not indicate
that you have these qualities. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to
becoming a scientist.

~~~
scott_s
The question isn't "Do people need the degree?" They're using PhD as a
metonymy for the Western process of training researchers. What they're asking
is "Is our current process of training researchers necessary?"

The current process involves some breadth requirement (exposure to most of
your field), and doing a starter-project (the dissertation).

~~~
akadien
Those two questions have the same answer. I have a PhD and my experience is
that the process is broken because it's geared towards the wrong goals of (1)
writing papers, (2) getting grants, and (3) the game of getting a tenure-track
position and then tenure. If you happen to make a great discovery, that's
nice, too. Most people I know get a PhD for career advancement, not to engage
in the scientific and discovery process.

My experience was that the process was more "cargo cult science" and less
science.

~~~
foldr
I think you just had the wrong expectations about what a PhD is. The idea
isn't _just_ to work on interesting problems for 5 years. You're also meant to
learn how to function as an academic, which necessarily means learning how to
write papers and (maybe) get grants. There's nothing "cargo cult" about that.
After all, cynicism aside, one of the best ways to get a paper published is to
_actually have a good idea_.

>Most people I know get a PhD for career advancement, not to engage in the
scientific and discovery process.

If you're in your 20s you'd have to be a bit crazy to take 5 years out without
thinking about your future career. If PhD programs didn't cater at all to
people's career needs you'd have an even heavier bias towards wealthy students
in grad school. That wouldn't be good for research.

~~~
akadien
It would appear so, but I did not. I have no regrets and enjoyed my time as
student and professor. I self-funded my PhD through fellowships and work,
which gave me freedom to work on any problem I wanted. That taught me self-
reliance and the power of creativity, not just technical skill and process.
That is something I don't think my counterparts who were supported by grants
grasped very well. During my time as a professor, I tried to give my own PhD
students the same freedom.

I agree that having good discoveries and novel algorithms should be a good way
to get a paper published. I respectfully disagree that the process isn't
"cargo cult", though. In practice, it tends to be more often than not. The
research culture rewards quantity over quality, and most papers are rubbish.
You will hear "Dr A has B publications" 100+ times more often than "Dr C has a
few papers that have been cited hundreds of times." That's an indicator that
our research culture is broken.

~~~
foldr
I guess it depends a lot on the field. I'm funded mostly by my department and
there aren't any restrictions on what I can work on. I don't find the standard
of published papers to be particularly awful, and my colleagues seem to be
getting on fine.

I agree that the emphasis on publication volume is a pain, but it's not so
easy to find good alternatives. In principle, it's all very well to say that
one good publication should count for more than ten mediocre publications, but
it gets a little tricky to make decisions that way in practice. It could well
have the opposite of the desired effect by making the process even more
cliquey that it currently is.

In general, I'm a bit bemused that people seem to hold academia to such
absurdly high standards. Some people seem to go in expecting it to be a
bullshit-free paradise of open and free enquiry. Well, it isn't -- academics
are human too. But it's really not as bad as all that.

------
wheels
The prerequisite seems to only be about a century old in western academia.
Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Betrand Russel, et al didn't have PhDs.
Faraday actually had no university at all.

Edit: Ah, apparently doctorates weren't even broadly granted in the sciences
until about a century ago:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#History>

------
T_S_
To make this clear, you may as well ask if surgeons need to go to med school.
It's required by regulation and tradition. Same with lawyers. It's more an
indication of the maturity of the field than the ability of the person,
although it hopefully represents a relevant hurdle.

So if you can devise a quantum computer without a PhD then the lack of one
won't hold you back.

~~~
arethuza
Medics, lawyers, accountants etc. are _professionally_ qualified, a PhD is an
academic qualification. They need to be licensed to do their job and if they
aren't they can't do it.

Not the same thing at all.

~~~
foldr
It's pretty similar in practice, though. A PhD is effectively a "license" to
hold an academic position.

~~~
Perceval
Perhaps we need a professional degree for research science. A JD is different
from a Law Ph.D. and an MD is different from a Ph.D in Medicine--so it stands
to reason that we could have a professional degree as a professional rather
than academic qualification.

~~~
foldr
I don't really see any need for that distinction. The curriculum would
presumably be about the same for both degrees.

~~~
Perceval
If you don't want to be an academic the curriculum might not be different, but
the dissertation requirement could probably be done away with. Some
universities have changed their Ph.D. programs such that you can graduate with
3 published articles in a peer reviewed journal. That seems like a reasonable
standard for a professional degree, as opposed to a full dissertation for an
academic degree.

------
yarapavan
Not exactly.

Look at computer scientists like Chuck Thacker, Robin Milner, Simon Peyton
Jones never had a PhD and they did first class work.

------
jderick
It really isn't a question of which system is better. It is about supply and
demand. If there is a huge demand for scientists (as there appears to be at
BGI today) then the requrements for getting a good job will be reduced. With
the scarcity of decent jobs in US Academia today the prolonged PhD/Postdoc
cycle is just a symptom of the underlying lack of demand.

~~~
jessriedel
It's not just a lack of demand for PI's, it's a strong demand for lab monkeys
aka grad students, like yours truly. So long as (1) most research labs require
many grad-student-level-trained hands for every professor-level-trained
supervisor and (2) grad students continue to be deluded about their chance of
securing a tenured position in the future, the situation will continue.

------
RK
I worked as an applied physicist / engineer at a smallish engineering company
directly out of college, where about 50% of the employees had PhD's. When I
decided to quit to get my PhD, the VP in charge of my boss gave me a 30 minute
lecture about how a PhD would stifle my creativity and that some of the best
people they had didn't have grad degrees. I was a little skeptical of that
claim, as the only technical person I could think of without a graduate degree
was that VP. He was very impressive, being both extremely intelligent and
clearly someone who just absorbed technical material (he had two bookshelves
full of grad-level math texts and seemed to know something useful on almost
every topic).

Looking back, I feel that I would be much more useful to that company after a
few years of grad school, receiving a more thorough mathematical and physics
background and experience leading my own research projects. Of course you
could attribute some of that to just "experience", which I might have gotten
just the same at that job.

------
johnohara
I'm listening to David Gilmour's "On An Island" right now. He didn't concern
himself with pursuing a Ph.D in music before starting his career. But his body
of work is extraordinary nevertheless and society has benefited tremendously.

Asking questions and following the scientific method doesn't need anyone's
permission either.

------
carbocation
My favorite example is Mark Daly (of GWAS fame). He basically got a PhD for
signaling purposes. He was already doing his excellent work beforehand, and
got the PhD for the benefit of the institution (MIT/Broad). Or, at least, so
goes the lore.

------
wynand
The mathematician Stieltjes never completed a PhD, but was first rate. He was
given an honorary doctorate so that he could apply for a chair at Groningen
university.

~~~
anamax
Bob Floyd never even tried to get a PhD. (He did collect letters addressed to
"Dr. Floyd".)

Stanford made him a full professor even though he didn't spend "enough" time
on the tenure track.

------
nazgulnarsil
credentials are for grant oriented signaling.

~~~
brg
This comment has a bit of truth in it. Institutions look at grant money
obtained before anything else when evaluating faculty. And without
credentials, the NSF et al have little else to go on for a new researcher.

------
marshallp
The entire system of academia is horribly twisted mess of politics and
inefficiency that creates competition at wrong the level (individual in their
20/30s rather than teams of people at whatever age).

Who got human genome mapped in three months - a team from private industry (it
took academia 15 years and boatloads of cash)

Who got a car to autonomously drive through the desert - s team people
motivated by a competition (academia hadn't managed to get it done before
then)

The current academic system of well connected 'star' PI's who are 'geniuses'
directing around masses of lesser 'grads/postdocs' is a scale of snobbery not
seen anywhere but show business and politics. It should be feel disgusting to
anyone who sincerely values science and human progress.

~~~
foldr
I don't really get the point of your examples. No doubt one could also point
to cases where academic researchers discovered something that industry didn't.
And businesses also tend to have a hierarchical organization.

~~~
marshallp
Businessman live or die by their skill at picking talent. Bureacrats who fund
science live and die by their skill at picked themselves. I'd trust the
businessmen to get the job done.

Monetary competitions like the X prize would get you scientific discoveries
faster and cheaper than the current system, simply because you would have a
businessman driving progress rather than studious scientist-cum-team leader
(PI).

~~~
foldr
Academics aren't particularly beuracratic in my experience -- most of them
hate doing paperwork. In any case, your views on this are obviously based on
considering what "ought" to happen given your stereotypes, rather than looking
at the facts. A _vast_ amount of research gets done in academia.

------
Daniel_Newby
It depends on the field. As far as I can tell, some undergraduate degrees are
traditionally so watered down that most graduates simply haven't had the
opportunity to become fit for research. (Chemistry, I'm looking at you.) Other
programs do better. (Physics. EE. CS at the more hardcore schools.)

~~~
jessriedel
I was a physics undergrad at a very hardcore school, and I can tell you that I
wasn't even remotely close to being able to do physics research upon
graduation. Even after taking two years of full-time grad classes, I
considered myself (and my fellow student) somewhat unprepared to choose a
research field, much less do independent research.

Part of this stems from the fact that US undergrad degrees are much broader
than in Europe. My understanding is that European undergrads specialize in a
topic day one, whereas US undergrads take at most half of their college
classes in their major.

~~~
marshallp
It's more that there is too much hand holding and babying of american
students. European students (at the good universities) are expected to
thoroughly and independently study for exams that will come two or more years
later. American students are driven by weekly assignments and all sorts of
midterms and quizzes. When it comes time to do independent research, the
american student is thoroughly unprepared compared to the european.

~~~
jessriedel
In my experience (physics graduate student), American students and European
students do not differ significantly based on work ethic, planning, or
organization. Certainly, the variance within each group in those categories is
_much_ larger than the difference between those groups.

The significant difference was that Europeans had completed more math and
physics course before they had to choose an advisor and commit to a research
topic.

