
Do scientists really need a PhD? - mbrubeck
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7285/full/464007a.html
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kevinalexbrown
I'm planning to get a PhD in a science, so this is a question I've asked
myself a lot.

From a theoretical standpoint, a PhD is obviously not a magical "get good at
science" button: there are plenty of other ways to gain competence. An example
is Rick Stevens at Argonne National Labs, [1], who I'm pretty sure doesn't
have a PhD (my friend worked for him once, and his bio doesn't mention it, but
I don't know him personally). People like that show that a PhD is obviously
not necessary to do first-class work.

On the other hand, if you want to be a principal investigator on a grant of
any decent size, almost no one will believe you have that competence without a
PhD. Part of this is the ridiculously rigid US scientific job market: all the
arbitrary structure of a resume, even less of the rationale. You can't get a
postdoc, almost trivially, without a doctorate. Even if someone wanted to give
you a job as a postdoc, the university wouldn't like it, and why choose the
guy without the PhD when you have other talented people who also have those
three letters? And it's really hard to get a faculty position without a
postdoc, so there you go.

So if I could go about becoming a principal investigator or having a nice
faculty position without getting a PhD, I'd seriously consider it. But
practically speaking, that's not a real possibility yet. Hopefully someday it
will be.

[1] <http://www.anl.gov/Administration/Bios/stevens.html>

~~~
p4bl0
I'm also planning to get a PhD in CS starting next year. But I think this
question is irrelevant, in the sense that it is not the right one. Because of
course the answer is formally "no", one can be a very good scientists without
having a PhD. But do society needs people getting PhDs and people training
them and the whole university system. Yes, definitely yes. And a PhD, even if
not formally needed to be a good scientists, is an effective way to become a
scientists since it's basically learning to be one with others who already
are.

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FaceKicker
Disclosure: first-year CS Ph.D. student.

I would say, no, a scientist doesn't really need a "Ph.D.", but does need the
training that a Ph.D. involves. To me, this question is very different from
the question of whether someone who wants to be an industry software engineer
needs a bachelor's degree (a popular HN topic). The difference is that in a
science Ph.D. program, you are _doing science_ the entire time you are there.
Sure, you take a few classes as well, but these are only to reinforce concepts
you'll need in your research; the entire reason you're there is to learn to do
scientific research by actually doing scientific research. You are doing at
school what you'll be doing in your career; you're just getting paid less for
it because you're "in training".

I don't see any reason why one couldn't get a similar education by doing
scientific research in an industry which does not result in a formal "Ph.D."
degree, rather than an academic setting that does result in a Ph.D., it just
doesn't seem like it's been tried up until (apparently) now. Personally (all
other things being equal) I'd rather do a Ph.D. program in an academic setting
because an industry setting would likely be constrained to research areas that
are beneficial to the company.

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larsberg
All scientists start out without a PhD. Then, they do some research. At some
point, they either have published enough novel papers or have done a single
piece of novel work that advances the art and warrants granting of a PhD.

If these students truly are primary authors on major papers in serious peer-
reviewed journals, I predict that this lab will end up with some sort of joint
academic agreement with a local university so that the ceremonial stapling of
bio papers and minting of PhDs can be done.

The rest of graduate school (classes, a master's thesis, etc.) is just
scaffolding to acclimate you to doing research. If you can skip all of that
and jump right in, nicely done!

But, of those 500 kids mentioned in the Nature article, I predict many do not
do top-quality published research. I would even bet their success rate
(measured as "people who graduate from just running experiments other people
designed") will be lower than that of a traditional PhD-granting institution,
were I a betting man. The scaffolding is expensive, but is there for a reason
beyond just tradition.

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spodek
I have a PhD in physics though I became an entrepreneur. My loose definition
of science is that you observe, predict, experiment, and honestly report your
results.

Five-year-olds can do that.

I have found exploring and studying nature one of the more rewarding and
pleasurable parts of my life. I've done it as a member of academic
institutions, but I also do it just walking in the park.

Three things I wouldn't confuse:

a) membership or funding in an academic institution

b) recognition from peers

c) practicing science

I consider them orthogonal. I consider a) a job, b) a nice perk, and c) an
enjoyable pasttime or hobby. Great when they overlap but unnecessary.

~~~
SilasX
>My loose definition of science is that you observe, predict, experiment, and
honestly report your results.

I would add one more thing: you become aware of others' efforts to do the same
and build off of their work rather than "re-invent the wheel". (That doesn't
mean you take it uncritically, just that you know what has been tried.)

That part is, AFAICT, what PhD programs most intensely focus on, i.e., make
sure you understand the existing work well enough that you can build on it
rather than just independently re-discover results in the field.

That part is also (usually) beyond the reach of five-year-olds.

Note: you can certainly still meet this requirement without an official PhD
program, of course.

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baddspellar
A PhD is a credential, as is a BS, an MS, or a CCIE.

As long as employers demand a credential for hiring, that credential will be
necessary. In the US, few companies are willing to take on the burden of
training scientific researchers. Further, much of the pure research in this
country is done at Universities, and virtually all US universities require a
PhD for tenure track faculty. So a PhD is a necessary credential to do
scientific research in the US.

The linked article states that Asian companies are willing to invest in
training smart university graduates to do research. That means the PhD
credential is not required. The required credential is instead a "University
Degree".

Now, if the question is whether the PhD system is the best way to create
scientists, that's entirely different. There's no reason to believe the
University PhD system necessarily produces better scientists than a corporate
lab would. University professors are not necessarily good teachers, and
University labs are not necessarily well equipped.

It's very similar to the "BS or higher in Computer Science or Engineering"
credential on help wanted ads in the US. Does that BS or higher really make
you a better programmer than someone who learned on his/her own? Of course
not. But it's a credential, so you get it.

Disclaimer: I _do_ have a PhD

------
raphman
One thing to note:

There are a lot of differences between PhDs in different fields of research.
Especially in biomed research, PhD students often seem to do extremely
specialized research. Therefore, what they learn during their PhD may be much
less generalizable than e.g. what CS PhD students learn. I guess it depends on
the definition of a PhD whether it is necessary for a certain job or not.

Interesting comments here: [http://scientopia.org/blogs/science-
professor/2011/03/22/rat...](http://scientopia.org/blogs/science-
professor/2011/03/22/rat-race/)

~~~
mvzink
I'm still an undergrad and therefore naïve, but I had always thought PhDs were
much more about proving they can perform research than "what they learn"

~~~
raphman
Maybe we should distinguish between the doctorate you get awarded for you PhD
thesis (the proof that you can perform research) and the stuff you do during
your PhD studies (what you learn). Depending on you advisor(s), your topic,
your own knowledge and motivation, and many other factors, you may be able to
conduct great research or mediocre research. Depending on how narrowly you
focus, you may acquire more focused knowledge or more broad knowledge during
your research. In fields like biomed research, you work on a very confined
topic within a large team. You may only need to care about your specific
experiment. Everything else is nothing you should (or need to) care about.
Compare this to a typical CS PhD student at a German university (e.g. me). You
more or less define the topic you want to work on by yourself, are required to
teach courses, supervise students, occasionally work on a commercial project,
and have to learn all that stuff which is necessary for your research, e.g.
user studies, statistics, machine learning, electronics, etc.

Having a PhD does not necessarily mean that you know how to perform proper
research. I know of a good number of PhDs that have little knowledge of core
scientific principles like correct attribution. In my opinion, what you learn
on your journey to a PhD is much more important (in most cases) than the topic
of your PhD thesis.

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PaulHoule
Frankly, the PhD is not a path to a permanent job as a scientist unless your
parents were scientists.

What it is is a program to get cheap labor that has the energy and low health
insurance costs of youth. At some point you get thrown away and they get
somebody new. The reason why P.I.'s are aging is that there are very few
permanent jobs for scientists.

Perhaps these people in China are a bit more honest than the rest of us.

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nn2
I doubt the scientists need PhDs, but a lot of research groups need cheap
sla^wgrade students and the PhD process provides that. Now if more of the
research funding actually was used for paying scientists that system wouldn't
be needed, but it is how it is.

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andrewl
Yes and no. Yes if you're talking about having a chance of working in the US
at the level lots of PhDs do (faculty at a university, principal investigator
of a grant-funded project, etc.). No if you're just asking if you need a PhD
to think and work independently at the level of a PhD in a given field. It's
my understanding that Freeman Dyson does not have a PhD, for example. He's
also a bad example, because he's Freeman Dyson, and most people are not.

Outliers are often bad examples. I think it's still a good idea to go to
finish college, although dropping out worked for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

------
Irishsteve
From what I gather, the point of a phd is to train researchers so they can
become independent researchers i.e set their own 'big question' and understand
methodologies to solve it. This article states that the research direction in
China is coming from external parties (I suppose commercial interests).

So all thats happening really is that companies are finding ever cheaper
sources of skilled labour to solve their current problems. Academic researcher
ideally shouldn't be linked to a companies motivations... or at least not all
of it.

~~~
hessenwolf
Yes - any large research project like the one described needs hordes of gobots
to do the labour and testing. This is not the same as having hordes of people
who identify both important hypotheses, and the means by which they will be
tested.

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tincholio
No, but it helps. There are some very bright researchers who don't have one
(Simon Peyton-Jones being one, for example), but they do help in forming
people as scientists. Of course, working after getting your BSc. as a
researcher on a specific area for many years is, in most aspects the same as
doing a doctorate, so except for the lack of diploma, there probably shouldn't
be a big difference.

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WhatsHisName
It's been my experience that most of these Chinese biotech companies are
factories. One guy makes all the money and the rest do all the work. This is
not at all like the computer technology model in the US.

~~~
hessenwolf
Bioinformatics, and chemistry/material science areas seem to me to require way
more semi-skilled labour in general than computer technology (even though I
could still really do with a basic DBA or two and a low-level html-cranker).

------
ThomPete
I guess the question is. Do you need a PhD to create scientific break-troughs
or practice science.

Cause that seems to be the only metrics worth considering when answering that
question.

I would guess the answer is no.

~~~
Radim
No need to guess -- the answer to that question is "no".

Universities started awarding PhD degrees at the (end of) the 19th century. If
PhDs were a necessity for scientific breakthroughs, then there couldn't have
been any scientific breakthroughs before the 19th century, a contradiction.

QED.

edit: but I got myself one just in case, anyway :)

------
tokenadult
Previous discussion 662 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183828>

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urbanjunkie
You don't need a PhD to be a scientist, but you almost certainly need a PhD to
be funded to do science.

(there are of course exceptions, but this is very much the general rule)

~~~
ams6110
As well you need one to be accepted as a legitimate peer in science
communities where everyone else has one.

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timpeterson
phd is dumb but skeptical china will be informative as a proving ground for
this idea,

do people think # of chinese nobel prize winners will increase in years to
come? realize nobel prize is a western world creation but this makes like seem
no...[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_coun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country)

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oldstrangers
Does Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey need a BS in Computer Science?
No, apparently not.

The purpose of science related PhDs has always seemed to be a means to an end
that wasn't financially available anywhere else. Academically, there are a lot
of pursuits that you simply can not pursue outside of that setting. The
science PhD is ultimately the direction you want your career to take, but you
know it can't realistically take that path without some luck. And of course,
the safety of academia is intoxicating on all levels. Why dive head first into
research that requires funding and years of preparation when you can basically
do the same thing at school without any repercussions? The PhD is a safety net
for abstract thought that has little to do with the real world.

It may seem like a crazy comparison, but the sort of struggles scientists go
through with their research is not entirely unlike what an artists goes
through. No one really wants to acknowledge your absurd existence, and there's
not really anyone to talk to when you do get on the outside. So no, success,
be it financially or scientifically does not require higher education. But
socially and emotionally, you can't underestimate the importance of things
like a PhD.

~~~
zerostar07
Are they scientists? No.

~~~
oldstrangers
Is computer science not a science? Someone should alert all the major colleges
of your discovery.

~~~
p4bl0
Computer science is a science. Engineering and programming are not. This is
_not at all_ a value judgement, just a fact. Studying/creating/improving logic
and type systems is doing science, creating Facebook is not.

The wording "computer science" is too much overloaded. In French we have even
less luck with the word "informatique": everything from studying category
theory to using Microsoft Word is called doing "informatique"… :-/

~~~
oldstrangers
So, building a bridge does not require science. And building the algorithms
for google also does not require science.

Its as though we need a new word for these non-science related sciences.

EDIT: I thought of it! Vanity Science.

~~~
urbanjunkie
Bridge building is accepted as engineering. Engineering is not science.

Brunel could probably not have formulated the Theory of Relativity. Einstein
could probably not have "built" the Great Western Railway.

The application of science is not science.

~~~
oldstrangers
So scientists create science, but non-scientists apply science? If a scientist
were to ever apply science, perhaps like those working at CERN, they would
ultimately become non-scientists? Wait, engineers _built_ CERN applying
science, but scientists _use_ CERN ... using science.

I think the only difference is that some scientists test science, and some
scientists apply science. Is a doctor a scientist or an engineer? He's both
testing and applying. Semantics are sometimes pretty stupid (or usually
always), and honestly that's the only reason I'm pursuing this silly argument.

~~~
urbanjunkie
Go and do some research into the difference between science and engineering.
Then go and do some research into the difference between theoretical and
experimental science.

Just because you use science, doesn't mean you are a scientist. The
application of science CAN be science, but often isn't.

Pointless trolling is always pointless.

~~~
oldstrangers
I'm not trolling, I just think the semantics involved in this discussion are
stupid.

Scientist: A person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of
the natural or physical sciences.

Seems rather open ended.

~~~
urbanjunkie
By your definition everyone is a scientist.

What has Mark Zuckerberg done that can be called science.

You should also cite your references - The Free Dictionary isn't particularly
credible.

