Being a life-sciences refugee myself, I read this essay and noted that my intellectual response to it was very discordant with my emotional response to it.
Intellectually, I think the author did a very good job and although like any scientist I could nitpick, grossly speaking I found myself agreeing.
Emotionally, however… Having been through the wringer I would ask any reader to consider not just the “central tendencies” viewpoint but the “this is YOU going through this” viewpoint.
If you are doggedly determined and personally consumed with getting into a fantastic lab to bootstrap your career so that you can slave away for essentially minimum wage with no benefits so that you could get a research position for which you might get a job security at the age of 42 to 45… Seriously?!
For many, that prospect looks very different when you’re closer to twenty than fifty.
Here’s another view point: the system is horribly horribly broken, leaving a trail of collateral human damage… But there are so many people throwing themselves at the meat grinder that inevitably greatness occasionally arises.
Do I sound bitter and cynical? Perhaps. But living the experience, for me and many many others, is rather different than reading summaries of what the life is like.
Thank you for this. I completely agree with you. Unfortunately my essay had a different focus but maybe I should try to interview people just on their personal feelings and see how that -- less cerebral -- perspective would be different...
While I like your article a lot, as I said in another comment, I disagree about some conclusions.
In my opinion, big groups are the cancer of life sciences academia. It's not just me who thinks that. If you look into all the organizational research that HHMI did prior to setting up Janelia Labs, they essentially concluded that CSHL, LMB and Bell Labs were so successful in the past because groups were small and all funding was internal (which implies you no longer need PIs, you can go back to classical professors).
The vast majority of the big PIs I have worked or interacted with (and that includes Cambridge, Oxford, EMBL, Karolinska, MIT and other places) are pure rent seekers, literally. They bet on some postdocs or PhDs and simply stamp their name as last authors if there is a publication. However, they rarely have any insights on what is being done. Sometimes they don't even understand it at all. So no value added, just profit. Unless you count as value chairing conference calls, calling editors to negotiate publication terms or discussing funding with agencies (most grants are actually written by senior postdocs, despite what author lists indicate).
That's when things go well. When personal issues pop up, they can screw up their subordinates big time. I have witnessed this many times. After all, grads and postdocs are just pawns in their chessboard.
Such an organization is at odds with classical academia, where your professor (not PI) was your mentor and you would engage into endless discussions about science with him. Other fields retain some of this approach, but in life sciences it is lost.
Intellectually, I think the author did a very good job and although like any scientist I could nitpick, grossly speaking I found myself agreeing.
Emotionally, however… Having been through the wringer I would ask any reader to consider not just the “central tendencies” viewpoint but the “this is YOU going through this” viewpoint.
If you are doggedly determined and personally consumed with getting into a fantastic lab to bootstrap your career so that you can slave away for essentially minimum wage with no benefits so that you could get a research position for which you might get a job security at the age of 42 to 45… Seriously?!
For many, that prospect looks very different when you’re closer to twenty than fifty.
Here’s another view point: the system is horribly horribly broken, leaving a trail of collateral human damage… But there are so many people throwing themselves at the meat grinder that inevitably greatness occasionally arises.
Do I sound bitter and cynical? Perhaps. But living the experience, for me and many many others, is rather different than reading summaries of what the life is like.