I am a casualty of this. I was originally intending to follow an academic career, until I discovered that my career would be dependent on my ability to secure grants. Something that if I was not bad at (which I think is unlikely), would at least be extremely stressful for me. It isn't the only reason I decided to to switch to being a software engineer, but it is a major reason.
Me too; I had my first NIH R01 turned down without a score and left for industry (which has allowed me to do more scientific work than academia ever did). I only realized later that most PIs don't get their first NIH R01 approved until ~10 years older than I was at the time.
What's ridiculous is the amounts of these basic grants that beginning scientists are trying to get are tiny- basically 1 person-year salary.
So surprisingly, many of my friends got their first R01s approved in the last year or two. Some actually didn't even have a good publication record or pedigree or institutional position. One even got 3! But was told that the committees are being lenient with first time appplicants.
Somehow that feels worse? Like a heroin dealer giving the first shot at a discount?
Glad I got out. I'm still hell bent on finding a way to do research (garage lab? Startup?) But f*k academia and universities. No way in hell I'm going to tacitly condone their ways by being part of it whether I can be successful or not.
I'm working to create a community model with a communal research lab. It's meant to meet my needs as a researcher while also removing pressures/norms from capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. What do you want to research and what's in your way?
I've heard this dream a few times, and have had it myself. Hazardous waste disposal and storage. This is the big kicker for any research project I might want to do.
Every other expenses after getting that set up is trivial (in comparison) for an individual researcher, though national lab style shared analytical equipment is nice. That can come later though...
It's really hard. It's much simpler to set up a machine shop or similar, but then it's just a new hackerspace that there are good models for already.
Partner with a hazardous material testing lab, or another type of operation where they use lots of hazardous material similar to yours and end up turning a bit of it into waste themselves.
Not necessarily an environmental lab where they actually test waste, better an industrial lab that tests material.
Some better opportunities can even be with material or waste handlers who have no lab at all.
Hazardous material does not become hazardous waste if you can legitimately sell/ship it off the site as a worthwhile product instead. Otherwise if you need to truly discard excess (even prime chemical assets then become a liability) you need to not only usually pay, but bump your paperwork and liability up from merely dangerous goods to full waste documentation requirements.
Ideally, as a scientific consultant (giving free advice only) once you get on the toxic site where yours is a drop in the bucket by comparison, you will be able to identify recycling opportunities worth way more to them than the cost of properly disposing of your paltry amount by the established registered professionals, according to the specific arcane regulations in place which you value their expertise for. They will love you.
So you can get the best deal possible.
Don't just recycle the equipment, recycle the chemicals.
> Hazardous material does not become hazardous waste if you can legitimately sell/ship it off the site as a worthwhile product instead. Otherwise if you need to truly discard excess (even prime chemical assets then become a liability) you need to not only usually pay, but bump your paperwork and liability up from merely dangerous goods to full waste documentation requirements.
This is what I meant. For a small organization I would expect a lot of small volume experimental products that are not exactly known in composition combined with perhaps some rinse acetone or other solvents.
Have you encountered an example where this works? I've done consulting for startups in exchange for a fume hood before, so I guess it's not that out there. It's much harder to imagine doing this for a big hazardous waste site, but maybe?
Thanks for the idea, I definitely won't be trying to do that but maybe there could be a symbiotic thing going on there. Probably a lot easier to do that with a university somehow? A national lab will be too stuck up to accept hazardous waste or advice, but maybe a university would hire you part time to work for them while letting you use the space for your own project.
Yup, I'm moving toward "retiring" from my employer and doing without a lab for a bit as I decide to get back into more action than the employer can muster.
I'll be able to maintain a good relationship with them and if I do go back into private practice nearby they will be able to handle the few liters a month I would expect to generate single-handedly.
Which is a drop in the bucket of their few drums, which are a drop in the bucket of the EPA waste hauler's truckloads.
Unknowns-R-Us.
OTOH the only time I went without a lab I built, was 2013 and I was tempted to try and operate in some vacant small-university space in my late father's retirement location, but I did not have the resources to _branch out_ while I still had my main lab in mothballs.
Things were also very uncertain plus one of the surplus spaces had already been unfavorably occupied by a not-very-well liked commercial EPA testing lab that I think failed just a year or two earlier and left everyone involved with a bad impression.
Now after recovering a bit from natural disaster, I'm going to check out UH where they took over the old Schlumberger facility as part of their energy effort a number of years ago. It still seems not fully occupied but I'll find out for sure eventually. Before the internet I sure spent a lot of time in the UH library.
When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.
I started out as a teenage businessman anyway so I'm not worried about going forward with only a briefcase again.
> When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.
This is basically my part time job now, I help maintain a university lab including things like repairing ancient equipment, training grad student TAs, helping the lecturers plan and run their experiments, and then just random grad students and professors drop in for advice and help. It's pretty fun.
What I don't do is take advantage of the fact that I have a chem lab attached for any personal work, I've never actually thought to ask. I have asked about setting up a catalyst test reactor lab to collaborate with the college of computing to see if we can build a testing lab for anyone creating new catalysts to analyze the results and invent new types. There were too many professors with a vested interest in doing that kind of project so they had no interest in supporting it.
It was very disappointing to see, I'd have been happy to run a test facility for all the professors to work with as a shared experimental facility but they all wanted to be the one to get the papers first. The minor consideration to me of being able to do some of my own research projects with the setup and a salary is all I'd have wanted out of it, I love mentoring students and would have loved to provide deep expertise to students working on such projects...
Could have made three departments able to produce high quality research in a field that no one here seems to actually be good at (i.e. traditional heterogeneous catalysts) with ChemE, MatSci, and CompSci all benefiting from the ability to generate large reliable datasets of how new catalytic materials behave in traditional chemical reactors. So cheap to set up too... just such a shame that I cannot do such a project at the place I work despite having been the director of chemical process development and specifically catalyst development at previous jobs. Ostensibly because professors are already doing it in their labs, but like, why would you not take advantage of expertise like mine to make these projects work?
So bizarre but I just don't have the stamina to push them on it, I probably literally just have to switch job titles for them to even notice that I am in fact a world class expert on catalysts and chemical processing. Instead I'm repairing oscilloscopes which is super fun but I sure miss doing actual research that matters.
That's great! Honestly I'm still navigating more pressing existential crises (like which country and then city to set roots in, if I even have a choice) but after that the plan is to embrace fields that are amenable for cheap amateur experimentation. In that regards, I have some connectomics projects with c. Elegans in mind, followed by evolution with basic cell lines. Depending on answers to aforementioned crises I was planning to be near some big univs so I can mooch off of their inventory control auctions and core facilities as need be and go from there! However if there's actually communities of similar minded people that'll only be great since it'll expand the no. Of topics I can dabble in (which is precisely what you can never ever do in academia contrary to whatever crap they peddle to get you into the system).
Here's what I want: a lab to experiment with these findings (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0078-7)in a 3D colonies from the perspective of encoding various structures from human culture (particularly the community housing the lab) and seeing how the microbes address different perturbations. And then remodeling the community's culture based on whatever findings are uncovered to test the relationship between human and microbial cultures. Or remodel the cultural blueprint within some communal space to see how it works with the outside world. Or...I don't know. There are so many ways to play with culture in this way.
We're tackling the question of where to live, too. I find it useful to identify my values & then to use that to filter my options. Choosing based on availability of resources tends to lead to all kinds of blindspots in my experience. We're also trying to figure out how the community model can work without moving and what the process looks like for building it out where anyone is. The approach I'm going for right now is to identify the exact spaces and ways of relating to them I want, creating an absurdly long organization name with all those words in the name, and a mission of "evolve the name" or something similar, short, and simple.
I find the surplus equipment from universities is not usually sent to _asset recovery_ (auctioned off) until it is older and more worn out compared to industrial operations.
So I always wanted (always did) have my lab in a heavy industrial area.
For biotech the US area of New Jersey and Connecticut has a high concentration of pharma giants and their many satellite contractors.
One business model has been to become enough of a contractor yourself to pay the bills, then research all you want and own it all yourself.
Yeah I tend to browse eBay and other resellers looking for old engineering / scientific equipment and even for obsolete stuff it often still resells pretty high.
I stuck it out in academia for (if I total it up completely), 15 years, before getting out and into industry. My experience matches yours--there's just so much interesting scientific work out there, and while some might argue that it's constrained due to the business priorities, the same applies to working in an academic group with specific priorities. Just like choosing a research group in academia, choose a company with priorities and interests which align with yours.
On the face of it, it's also a less risky choice. In academia, you're always fighting over scraps of funding, and you're always just one grant application away from a career failure. Just one rejected publication or failed experiment can end you if it causes you to fail to get more funding. While I wasn't a PI, I was made redundant after our group lost some of its funding, and I put some of that down to a paper rejected on utterly ridiculous grounds by a competitor lab. Petty academic politics. In industry, it seems that companies are much better at managing and mitigating risk. Projects are initiated with the expectation that they will have a high chance of failure, but that useful knowledge will be gained. Project managers will give projects a certain amount of runway and then make a go/no-go decision for continuation at defined points. You might run several projects in parallel and know that some will work out and some won't. Being on a "failed" project isn't a career-limiting move in that situation--you'll try your best doing some very cutting-edge stuff and your efforts will still be valued. Rather than being fired, you'll move onto another project and continue doing interesting stuff. It's much less stressful even though I likely work harder! And if the company stops being interesting, there are plenty of others to go to.
Biomedical engineer with a 2.977GPA. Lots of extra curriculars, volunteered in labs, 160 credit hours of mostly STEM classes, lots of grad-level courses, relevant work experience, but GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters and I didn't get into any of the grad programs I applied for.
I ended up doing fine in software development though. Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight. Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research.
There's many issues in our science system, but it may be a blessing that you got rejected.
I'm a senior software engineer. My wife has a PhD in biochemistry from a top university. When she graduated she could not get a job anywhere. We both agreed she should choose a different path and she started a business in a totally unrelated field.
Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews. I have no doubt she'd be able to be success in the IT industry amongst the many roles offered if she had chosen the path. And many of her peers have self studied, dropped their grad programs and get hired by the likes of Facebook, Microsoft.
Pragmatically, the smartest one would never get into fields with limited jobs and pay. I'd rather pick a field so I can feed my family, than to save the world.
The US will get leapfrogged in R&D as the brain drain goes towards generating ad revenue (For the record I do not work for a company that relies on generating ads)
> Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews.
How do you manage that? I've been a software developer for over 20 years now, and every time I lose my job it's a SLOG to find another one, with anywhere from a few months to a year in between. I can't even remember the last time a recruiter contacted me (perhaps 5-6 times in my entire career).
It's not like my technical skills are lacking. I've worked professionally with most popular languages and technologies, have dozens of popular open source projects under my belt, many of which you're probably even using at work in some fashion. I've even been called a "miracle worker" a few times for the projects I've saved from ruin, or terrible processes I've optimized.
I'm friendly with everyone, not badmouthing, staying out of politics, treating everyone professionally and expecting the same.
But then whenever there are layoffs or there's an opportunity to push someone out, I'm in the first wave to go (they never say why). I've even been fired for "not stepping up enough." And then I spend another few months slinging resumes all over, spending my days doing coding challenges in the hopes of getting an interview. Then another year of employment and the cycle starts all over again. I have to constantly prove myself again and again, as if I were fresh out of college or something.
This may be difficult to hear, but something is wrong if you have been working for 20 years and old colleagues aren't occasionally checking in to see if you'd like a different gig at their current company. The people who called you a miracle worker, they don't keep in touch? They don't want you to join their current project?
You may want to ask someone who you are on good terms with what's going on.
Original commenter here. People don't reach out to me. I reach out to people. I make sure I keep the relationship open. People are way too busy with their lives to maintain connections. Imagine how happy you would be if someone you used to work with reached out to see how you're doing. I'd be very happy. That's why I try to do it...because I know on the other end my former colleague would be happy.
I work at a huge company and have been on many teams and projects. Every few days, weeks - I'd ping people just to see what's up and strike a conversation. I don't do it annoyingly...there's a fine balance. You also need to be able to tell who is social and who is not. If you can read that someone has a social personality I'll talk to them more, be friend them...talk to things besides work. There are those who only like to talk about work, and that's fine. Then we just talk about work. I go out of my way to help them out with any problems at work or outside of work.
For example someone is a first time home buyer...so I gave advice (I've bought 2 homes in my young career). Another, a manager...his son is in med school, I gave advice (my roommates in grad school were in med school). Another had problems with implementing PGP...so I stayed late one night to help her out.
Yes, that's a thing if you have good relationships with coworkers who have hiring power in later jobs. Since I switched to being a founder I've firmly disabused most previous coworkers of the notion that I'd ever come to work with them, but I used to regularly hear from them, and now I routinely reach out to the people that I liked working with.
If you're not experiencing this, you really can't ask anyone else anything, but you can ask yourself what's wrong. It might just be that you haven't made friends with people who have hiring influence; that said, most people can at least refer folks. More likely is that you aren't getting personally close enough with people at work, so they are not thinking of you. Spend more time interacting on a human level with non-engineers, who are way more often to be influential re: hiring at future jobs.
It's also possible that you're not considered a solid worker, or you don't get along with people, but in my experience that's a lot less common than merely not making friends with people who are likely to have jobs to offer in the future. Learning to find and befriet those people is a key career skill.
Maybe 10% of my coworkers transitioned from work acquaintance ("Hi Jim") into good work acquaintance ("hey man, grab lunch?") into friend ("hey man, want to grab dinner/beers later?") into good friend ("hey man, want to go on an out-of-country trip?").
If nobody is making the jump into good work acquaintance, where you enjoy hanging out casually without needing an explicit work reason, something is amiss. I don't try to form connections, it just happens similar to how you make friends in class. Work is class. If nobody talks to you after the project is over something isn't right.
You can't ask people who aren't close directly why they aren't close, but maybe family members / non-work friends. "Is there something about me that makes it difficult to make connections?" It's quite hard to get explicit feedback on this type of thing.
> You can't ask people who aren't close directly why they aren't close, but maybe family members / non-work friends.
Yes! I've done exactly this, and the result is always the same: They can't believe that I'm having problems in this area. "I can't understand how ANYONE could dislike you!" is what my dad said.
Ah, don't get sad -- you seem aware enough to recognize the problem. Just a few thoughts:
* These connections are easier when you're in your 20s, single, have time to kill. The company culture may encourage/discourage this too.
* If you're a developer, you may be among a less-extroverted cohort, and have to make efforts to reach out vs. being reached-out-to.
* These are the hard-to-teach-explicitly items, but is every interaction with coworkers purely about the project? Hobbies, shared interests, movies they've seen, games they play, trips they've done/are going to do, etc.? With a (non-work) shared interest it's hard not to have casual conversations that build a work repoire over time.
* There are intangible social signals about willingness to connect (person is overly polite/formal/rigid, facial expressions/body language, warmth of tone and language, etc.). Basically when you sit down next to someone on an airplane, you can tell if they want to chat without having to ask them. Being actively disliked is rarely the issue. You don't dislike the cashier at the grocery store, but the relationship is purely transactional, we can be friendly but let's just get this over with. For some reason, your coworkers may see things this way.
Working somewhere for decades and not being in touch with a single colleague is not normal. Imagine hearing "I didn't keep in touch with a single person from my 16 years of primary + university education after school ended."
Some people can't see color either, and unfortunately their life is more difficult because of it. But seeing color is the expected outcome for most, and the world is built with that assumption in mind.
If you aren't making connections you are unfortunately at a severe disadvantage. To the extent you're self-aware to realize this, you may be able to correct it. Otherwise, like anything else, you learn to adapt.
What a ludicrous comparison. Contrasting a physical disability vs. a conscious choice not to engage with colleagues from companies past is a sign of a failing argument.
Your tone also comes off as incredibly patronizing, as though you know my life better than I do.
Rest assured, not keeping in touch with old contacts has not caused me to miss any opportunities that I would be otherwise interested in.
I work for a big company... It's not a FAANG, but it's recognizable world wide. Even though it's not a tech company, I believe the name recognition gives some credibility to recruiters.
I'm lucky to have worked at a previous company that had a lot of well connected software engineers and management. It was a mid size company so I was 2 levels from the CTO. They are my connections on LinkedIn so I think that adds credibility.
I'm a java developer. Despite the hmm...'hate' for Java on HN, if you go to dice.com and put in various languages...Java is very high ranking. Having years of experience in a technology with a lot of jobs help.
Some alluded to keeping in touch with old coworkers. I'd have to strongly agree to that. Strongly. I have your back, you have my back. Right? I hate interviewing. HATE. I've been fortunate in the last several years to have had 4 former colleagues ask if I want to join their team/company. I seriously considered each one, but declined for various reason.
At one point, my company was having layoffs. I knew I should have a backup plan in case my name was on the list. But I hate interviewing...all it took was a phone call to an old colleague of mine (he's now a director) and I was given an open job offer. I enjoy where I currently work {enough} that I'll stay for a while longer.
Seems weird to never be contacted by recruiters, are you not using linkedin during your job searches? After my last round of linkedin application spamming I get a steady stream of emails about opportunities even after I stopped looking.
Yes, when I'm looking for work I turn on the looking-for-work thing on linkedin. I'll get 1 maybe 2 generic pings over the next few months for "fullstack dev" (which I'm not - I do server-side or low level software), but that's about it.
I don't want to dunk on you with really obvious suggestions like "you have a bad resume, fix it" type comments, maybe you've already had it looked over, and you're in a non-optimal location or something. Maybe ask a few specific questions on reddit somewhere like r/cscareerquestions.
I've been wracking my brain for years over this, and I'm still not any closer to understanding what the problem is.
I've had my resume looked at and tweaked over and over. I never send a cover letter without having someone else proofread and offer suggestions. I've lived and worked in many tech-hub places, including San Francisco for 6 years.
I just don't know... I think it's got to be socially related, but I have a hard time examining that aspect because I'm autistic. But I always make a concerted effort not to offend people, to make sure everyone gets their say and can contribute. People even say I'm a really nice guy, so then I'm left wondering what exactly "it" is that's tanking me...
It always happens the same way:
- I get a job and everyone is super friendly. Some inevitable technical hiccups getting set up for the first month, but no big deal.
- Everything goes swimmingly for the next 6 months to a year. People seem happy with me, performance reviews are fine, 1-on-1 with the boss is fine. I even make a point of asking if they're unhappy with anything about me, and they say "no, everything's fine".
Then one day things go bad (or maybe they've been bad and I didn't see). People start being rude to me, start shutting me out of conversations, start being extra harsh or petty in code reviews etc. In some cases they start name-calling. No higher-ups step in so I try to avoid the people doing this and not antagonize them.
Eventually my boss brings me in for the "it's not working out" talk. They can never give me a solid reason why, and often they resort to roundabout firing methods because it's technically illegal otherwise. There's never a warning, never a list of things to improve upon. I spend most of my days at a company wondering when I'll get "the call". The worst one happened on Dec 23rd.
So yeah... Probably nothing that anyone on HN could help with, because the feedback mechanism I'm subjected to is so vague. But it's frustrating nonetheless, and even today I have constant stress spikes whenever my boss asks to talk to me for a minute about something, wondering if this is it.
> I think it's got to be socially related, but I have a hard time examining that aspect because I'm autistic.
There you have it. It's brutally unfair, but autism, if strong enough to be perceivable, sounds like the most likely cause: you're different, and people don't like you because of it.
Even worse, I believe that people on the autism spectrum don't even perceive they're different. I personally have no idea whether I'm on that spectrum, or how far. Still: my own Mom once stated the "obvious": that I must notice that I'm not like others. I had to tell her that I don't. At 35.
So. People perceive you're different. It's obvious enough that they expect you to perceive that difference, even though you may not. So when you fail to conform to the obscure (to you) group norm, they end up rejecting you. Perhaps even rationalising that you're doing it on purpose (remember, the difference is obvious to them). Then you're out of the group.
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There may be other factors as well. Folks tend to be kinder, more forgiving, of pretty people, so if you can improve that in any way, try to do so (one habit at a time though, take it easy). The easiest thing to go for, I think, is clothing: try having someone you trust chose your clothes for you. Pay explicit attention to the dress code at your workplace, emulate it a little (but don't buy the exact same clothes either!). Also consider light makeup if you're a woman (and maybe get counsel about that too).
Much harder is taking good care of your health. If you're fat, unfit, or otherwise unhealthy, try to work on that. Sleeping well, eating well, and exercising properly is surprisingly hard when you're not used to it, but it's a must.
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Edit: also consider telling your colleagues about your autism. I expect it's not easy, and it may not even be a good idea, but there's a chance that people knew why you are the way you are, they'd tolerate it better.
(edit: oops sorry I didn't properly parse the bit about being autistic on first read. I won't delete my suggestions in case they are useful in some way)
Well the coworker stuff is a separate issue because recruiters don't usually know you, probably you need to address the two issues separately.
As for improving your interactions with coworkers, I'll just throw a few ideas because who knows, maybe the answer will come from a random source like me:
- read 'How to win friends and influence people', maybe some stuff by Mark Manson.
- Try to learn from your successful relationships what you're good at/comfortable with
- Actively choose the environment you aim work in to fit your social strengths e.g. team size, people types. ( This one depends a bit on solving the jobsearch issues first )
Asking for feedback directly will never work. Instead, try asking a friend (or use a fake account) to ask for a reference about yourself. You can then be as targetted as you like.. "have you considered referring throwaway_gerts before? If yes/no why?" Or "were there any issues working with throwaway_gerts?"
It's unfortunate to see people disadvantaged by pursuing a truly difficult major.
A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because the courses were truly difficult.
A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with softer, more grade-inflated courses.
The GPA is an interesting system when you sit down to think about it. I came into college with almost 30 general education credit hours. I received the International Baccalaureate diploma in high school. I only needed 1 more gen ed course to fulfill my requirements.
So imagine me, a 18 year old jumping immediately into fairly difficult courses my freshman year...adapting to college. Whilst my peers are taking English 101 and inflating their GPA. I did not receive internships offers my early years in college and I feel this had a big part of it.
Not for you obviously, but in case someone else that is still in the situation of applying for grad school is reading this.
Have you checked outside the US?
In the EU there are plenty of universities that offer grad programs without the crazy access requirements of US universities. Tuition is free or at a token price in many countries. And it's reasonably easy to get a paid PhD studentship where you get paid a real salary, not slave wages (probably this is not that easy to get when you're straight out of your Master's with a mediocre GPA, but once you have shown ability to do research successfully and have a couple of papers under your belt, it shouldn't be hard in most places).
Sure, EU universities don't give you the clout of Ivy League, but many do perfectly fine research, you may even learn more as the 3rd PhD student of a professor than as the 27th PhD student of a superstar professor that talks to you five minutes once a month, and can advance your career path just fine.
I'm talking about the EU because it's where I am and can talk more or less confidently about, but this is probably true of many other countries and regions outside the US.
It's crazy to see how many people don't even consider this. I remember an Iranian researcher I was going to hire for a PhD position, she ended up going to the US because you know, it's the US... she faced the Trump ban and the PhD student tax hikes (here she would have a salary allowing her a middle-class lifestyle and without all those threats), and to this day she has significantly fewer papers than the person who had the second best CV and interview and I hired instead. Seriously, there is life outside the US!
I think your question is too general. For example, there may be institutions that have e.g. a great civil engineering lab while being mediocre at electrical engineering. And the same can be true of subfields of each engineering discipline (for example, I'm in CS, and it's common to see institutions that have a powerful group in one specific area of CS - say computer vision, robotics, NLP, theoretical CS - and aren't anything special in others).
I think you should look at what specific research you want to do and then check what labs are publishing interesting papers on that specific thing.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, I am a PhD dropout in Mech Eng with lots of CS and finance/econ exposure as I dropped out to join a bank. I want to do something cross disciplinary and vague ideas of systems science especially since I read Saltzer Kaashoek(sorry for butchering the spellings) Principles of Computer System design and sort of using a systems design approach to manufacturing processes and such. Like a lot of ideas of CS are from Engineering Management like JIT etc and how the design of networks is an evolution of earlier metaphors of telegraph and telephone systems.
To keep it short, how do I even find what I want to look for? Any tactics that you would want to suggest?
This is not a judgment on you. It sounds like you really challenged yourself, and may have done well in such a program.
This is just an explanation of how admissions offices work: Bio programs of any flavor at most halfway decent schools are so over-subscribed that there are far more people who exceed the minimum requirements than there are spots for them. Admissions offices have very limited resources to review enormous #'s of applications. 3.0 is a pretty good low-pass filter that eliminates a lot of those applications while still retaining applications from students who, from a probability standpoint, are most likely to succeed in the programs. Extra curriculars & volunteer work at labs show that you're willing to work hard, but not the quality of that work, so those become distinguishing factors only for students that already jumped the GPA hurdle. Academic success from someone with < 3.0 GPA would represent an outlier, and there are no good ways identify who those outliers are, and finding them isn't important when there are plenty of qualified applicants who are easier to identify.
There's probably lots of students in your boat who would have contributed well to the body of scientific knowledge. But for every one of them-- and I have literally seen these students-- there are dozens upon dozens that are let into more lenient programs, unable to do the work & burdened with $100k+ in debt & nothing to show for it.
> Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research.
I am very interested in this concept. Are you thinking of any in particular? I really wish people invested in public spaces people could go do science, particularly chemistry.
I joined one called "BioCurious"[1] in the SF Bay area to work on a project making a fluorescence microscope. The project was advertised on Meetup.com which is how I found it, and there were other similar projects that met up weekly. If you paid a membership fee though you got 24/hr access so I met a person there outside of academia who was using the lab's resources to continue the neuroscience research he had done for his PhD.
In the bay area I also know of CounterCulture [2] which I've only heard high praise of but I've never visited. I've since moved to Baltimore and found some places I wanted to check out but unfortunately because of Covid I've been stuck at home.
Thanks for sharing. I'm in Baltimore, too. Please post these places if you have a chance. Would love to check them out when possible. Searching the web, I have found https://bugssonline.org/.
When I moved here I made a list of hacker spaces that were both general and biology-focused. I thought I had found more that were focused on bio but unfortunately I think you're right, for biosciences it's only Baltimore Underground Science Space.
>Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight.
That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right? Many discoveries during that time and in the centuries before were done by individuals rather than institutions.
>> That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right?
There's plenty of low hanging fruit as the industry grows wide.
While any given industry is subject to the asymptotic curve of progress, innovations in human biology have been incredibly slow due to bureaucracy and IRB slowdowns + grant model.
Human-powered flight wasn't considered a really good idea at the time of the Wright Brothers either, and many people died in the decades following it. It's only in hindsight these ideas seem obvious.
So I'm no in the US so not familiar with your GPA system, but couldn't you just take one more class which you knew you'd do well at to push that over the line?
Yup, and I did consider it. But another semester of college just to boost my GPA would've been expensive. I don't have regrets how things turned out, but point is my story is common
Hah, I'm still motivated but I was also pretty aware of the other comments being made here about higher education at the time (excessively political, funding sparse, job search difficulties for bio fields). I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for 4 years of undergrad and graduated with low debt. The extra semester would have doubled my debt with no guarantee I'd be better off after.
I know things I could've done or could do now if I wanted to go back, but I think I'm more interested at the moment in how to make the research I want to do more accessible.
> GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters
Your application was most likely reviewed by real people, not just automated filters. People with GPAs below 3 do get into competitive grad programs (and med school). An upward trend is the key.
I'm sure this happens to some people with the right combination of luck, perseverance, and recommendations. It's probably far more likely at your current institution as you already have relationships with professors who sit on the admissions committee. Particularly if you are already productive in a lab and the principal researcher goes to bat for you.
That doesn't change the OPs point that this is an uphill battle. If they didn't have the above, or they could only get into the right program then it still leaves them with better alternatives elsewhere. Harvard almost certainly filters all candidates with a GPA less than 3.0. Unfortunately academic grades have a poor correlation with future career or research performance.
Ah.. I don't think this comment deserved to be downvoted. I did actually have one place reach out -- a lab at U of Toronto. But they asked if I was international and when I said yes (USA) they apologized and said they didn't have funding to sponsor an international student. But yeah, all the other schools were faceless rejections
The grant system completely compromises most faculty'$ ability to do anything with their decades of training besides sell themselves. Especially young faculty during their most productive years. The only way to turn this around is to change the way we give credit for scientific achievements, and stop rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships. (Im ex faculty)
> The grant system completely compromises most faculty'$ ability to do anything with their decades of training besides sell themselves.
I agree that the academic world is broken, but this narrative that success -- in any field -- isn't dependent on your ability to sell yourself is problematic.
I left academia behind because I saw that it was a brutal, improbable grind, sure, but mainly because I could see that the same skills needed for success as a professor had a much higher expected value elsewhere. In academia or otherwise, disproportionate success comes to those who combine ability with self-promotion. The people who put their heads down and focus on obscure problems will always be at the mercy of the winds.
> but this narrative that success -- in any field -- isn't dependent on your ability to sell yourself is problematic.
Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal for everyone if these people are blocked from making contributions to science.
Yes - the idea that everyone in science must be a fantastic Jack or Jill of all trades is absurd. There is no room for oddballs that are missing any of 20 subtle skills, including many social ones that should have little to do with research skill. Incentivizing teams to succeed instead of individuals is essential for reforming our current broken system.
The question is what would be the alternative to grant applications. A grant lottery?Tenure lottery? Stop funding entirely and just include "dear God, make our science advance" in your evening prayer? Nobody considers the grant treadmill an achievement to be proud of, but arguments against the claim that it's the least bad solution have to go beyond just "it's not good".
How about actually measuring them by the citation count on their papers (note this is already a minor factor in tenure decisions, after monies brought in :P )
The thing is, you're trying to create a metric that measures an essentially unmeasureable quantity and to predict future outcomes on this.
Moreover you're trying to do this for generally very smart people, so obviously they adapt their behaviour to those metrics (they game the system is a less favourable way of saying this). So the only thing you have achieved that the academics change their work to maximize those metrics. We have seen this with grants as well, to be successful you essentially have to write lots of grant (a period without grants can be career ending), so academics spend up to 50% of their time on grant writing and reviewing. At this point I'm not convinced a lottery would not be a better way of distributing money (and I say that as someone who has been fairly successful at getting grants)
Citations are cheap, and they are being gamed all the time. It's like search engine optimization, but on a smaller scale.
Grants are one of the least bad means of evaluating a researcher, because the decisions are not made lightly. Getting funded usually implies that experts have spent a nontrivial amount of time judging the merits of the applicant and their ideas and found them particularly worthy.
> Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal for everyone if these people are blocked from making contributions to science.
Sure...lots of people make fantastic technical workers, and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. I'm not denying their existence. I'm saying that academia is an organization made up of humans, and as such, has the same bias toward self-promotion and social skills as any other field. At the end of the day, people make the decision of who get to be professors, get grants, and so on. Success in an academic discipline, for most people, is about being known, liked and respected amongst the small circle of colleagues who dominate that discipline.
The mythology I am combatting here is that academia was ever this magical unicorn land where introverts and brilliant weirdos can prosper. It happens more often than some fields, I guess, but mostly the same social dynamics apply. It's kind of the same wishful thinking you see from brilliant engineers who can't work on a team -- they invariably stop progressing, and wonder why they don't get promoted up the technical ladder. They can still contribute in the area of their greatest skill, but they're limited in the long run by their social abilities.
It's really common to see brilliant people with no interpersonal skills wash out in grad school. It's almost a cliché. The ones who do make it, rarely advance to a professorship -- they'll get stuck at postdoc or staff scientist or something like that, because some professor is more than willing to keep them around, hidden in the lab, for their exceptional technical skill.
If we weren't paying every mafioso at harvard 200k/yr in summer salary, we could fund a good number of them at subsistence wage. (note: there are also many decent people at harvard...)
It's true one must advocate for one's self. It's not true that we should choose structures that require more self promotion than productivity. Academia used to be rife with corners where obscure problem solvers could live a decent life. The pressure for grant monies and summer salaries have done away with those corners and it shouldn't be so.
On one hand, I've heard E. Allen Emerson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Allen_Emerson) complain that he was hoping with tenure he'd be able to just go off and work on whatever interested him.
I wonder how much of the rise of modern "pop-sci" as a genre in writing, film, and tv is due to the current academic incentives. If you're so good at selling yourself and field why not take the pitch directly to a paying audience rather than grant committees?
While at first I balked at this idea, I suppose what you're proposing is crowdsourcing academic research funding. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is how accountability can be managed. One of the major pitfalls of the crowdfunding model seems to be that the fundraisers can make like bandits with the money, with seemingly little recourse, or incentive for the crowd.
I don't think that I was proposing crowdfunding for science, but rather that the incentives in modern academia would give rise to modern popular science figures as those most able to secure funding. It's likely not the healthiest situation for actual discovery.
Many faculty getting the most funding are never involved in writing the papers attributed to them. (Source: years spent at the top five universities and my own faculty experience)
Would work simply: fund students directly. If faculty contribute training or ideas students can grant authorship. Faculty/postdocs still peer review papers.
I really like this idea of funding students directly, I feel like it’s pretty well aligned with e.g. the NSF’s mission wrt workforce development, and it reduces the power imbalance for students who find themselves in a toxic group environment
I guess there’s still a need for bigger grants because some labs cost more than others to run, but those grants could cover the cost of equipment and materials without having to directly cover student salaries.
Yeah. I think simply making faculty apply for infrastructure and only funding students and no faculty time is the right way to go. Unfortunately this is the opposite of the way that the NSF is being propelled (since panels are dominated by 'eminent scientists' ~= well connected old lazy scientists)
> If faculty contribute training or ideas students can grant authorship.
I don't know a particularly good way to get around this issue and still reward faculty for collaboration with students, but, in this situation, faculty are just going to pressure students to 'recognise' their (the faculty's) contributions with an authorship—say, by threatening to withhold a recommendation letter.
> The only way to turn this around is to change the way we give credit for scientific achievements, and stop rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships. (Im ex faculty)
I totally agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but I don't see how your proposed solution would solve anything.
First of all, grants are needed to do any meaningful research and advance one's careers in most fields, authorship or no authorship. So the incentive to spend a disproportionate amount of time selling oneself would still be there.
Second, as you yourself imply, the reasons why young faculty don't take a more active role in research are (mostly) not voluntary, it's because they are forced into the grant treadmill. I don't see why they deserve punishment (in the form of fewer authorships) on top of that. They're already overworked getting the grants and you want them to spend more hours in the lab to get authorships in addition?
Third, how do you even police authorships? Especially when a person has a position of power due to having the funding with which other people in the lab are hired. There are already guidelines from scientific societies that in theory don't allow people who just obtained the funding to claim authorship, but people do it anyway. Even if someone complained, they can claim that they actually contributed (e.g. by going through the paper, checking and polishing for correctness) and it's very hard to disprove.
I think the solution has to be to the tune of (1) funding purely based on past CV, not projects (spare us all the effort of convincing reviewers that what we're going to do is the bee's knees, and drawing fictional Gantt charts when in research it's practically impossible to predict anything. If we have produced relevant results in the past, we will probably keep producing them); (2) flatter funding (reward better CVs with better funding, but keep decent enough funding for everyone to keep feedback loops at bay and not throw people that got unlucky with experiments under the bus); and (3) individual funding for everyone instead of a large chunk of funding that goes to the head of the lab.
It's a hard and frustrating career. I work on an academic lab but the chances of me having an independent research program are very low. However, everyone who wants something from you -- especially your PI -- will string you along in the hope you will stick to your low paying job. I am trying to find a better job in industry but the jobs I see posted tend to be for data science (I am not a strong stats person) or too junior for my experiences.Finding the right fit is very hard when my contact network is limited to clinicians and academics that tend to have anti-industry sentiments.
A job being "too junior" for someone often means they can't get it even if they want it - the organization is looking for someone with little experience who is presumably young and can rise through the ranks.
And willing to do it as a postdoc making too little to pay rent without more housemates than there are bedrooms in the house. Everyone needs a first job I guess, to learn how much more they're worth than they got paid in their first job?
I have already done the post-doc part. It was so painful that I really don't want to do a second one. There's that glass ceiling in academia when it comes to respect and salary they is very hard to break through without being promoted to a full PI and given your own lab.
Postdoc pay is ridiculous, I had a job I was really interested in but the second they said it was a postdoc all I could hear was "this will not pay the rent". I don't get it. Urban universities are just so preferred that they can pay the same amount or less than a university in a lower rent town. It only makes sense if you're getting a giant reputational or career boost, or have personal reasons.
I dunno. I'm about where you are I guess. Stuff is either too junior or the stuff I want to do is just enough outside my field that it's hard to figure out who to talk to. It's depressing, even moreso now where you have to really work at it to "run into people".
The best I've ever figured out is to take the thing I'm really good at, and find places that happen to need that but also do the thing I want to learn. It doesn't work great. I guess I suggest conferences but I wouldn't go to one during COVID... I'm bad at this I guess though.
I have the same problem. COVID has made it much harder. I finally have some decent publications and was hoping to go to some of the bigger Cancer Genomics conferences this year to try to build a network but it's not the same when it's a virtual meeting.
I wouldn't call myself a casualty, but I was definitely considering being a professor and definitely decided not to after seeing how ridiculously hard my adviser had to work despite her being famous and well funded.
It just didn't seem like a job that one could do for decades without ruining their health. I'm amazed by the people who do manage to do it, but I'm confident that my decision was the right one.
Instead, someone else will be the person to study how to use ML to develop new catalyst types, and I'm sad that all the thought and effort I've put into figuring it out will probably just never be of use to anyone. I'm not a good enough programmer for Google, so basically what other option would I have other than academia or a national lab? The problem isn't going to be solved in five years, but the rewards... maybe not mRNA vaccine level but reducing energy and resource waste with more efficient conversion technologies across the entirety of modern civilization seems worthwhile.
I don't even mind writing grants that much and have gotten lots of them for industry research. And I absolutely love mentoring. But I just know from what I saw that I have no desire to try to handle that much entirely unnecessary extra stress, even though it means that I do mostly straightforward electrical engineering despite having invented entirely new catalyst design technologies being used in industrial facilities.
Would I love to still be working in chemicals and energy more directly? Absolutely! Am I willing to do it for a third the salary with 80 hour work weeks having to scramble desperately to network in order to gain enough mindshare to get people to even listen to my proposals? I wish I had that kind of stamina.
Which is to say, ultimately, that I have no interest in academic politics. I want to solve these problems, and no longer have the energy to pursue another startup.
Maybe in another five years when there are more companies finally doing it I can just get a job there. Sadly I can guess that they will instead just get ML researchers and assume teaching them catalyst science will be easier than teaching me ML tools because ML didn't exist when I was in grad school as much of a thing yet so by sheer misfortune of timing I didn't learn it until my 30s.
It's just sad to me that I see no realistic way to get involved even though it's my honest life passion to fix this problem and it's such a stupid struggle to get support. It would have been really nice to feel supported in doing such work inside of academia.
If you’re looking to get back into the materials research industry doing applied ML, now is a great time — no need to wait five years. In my experience there’s a lot of demand for people conversant in both fields, a lot of interest in adopting this kind of work, and a growing set of interesting opportunities.
I work in this field at a national lab, but in my experience there are a lot of industry players trying to figure out how to grow in this area
Edit: take a look at what the technical societies are doing. MRS and TMS have been rolling out educational programming targeted towards industry members. I’m not in the catalyst field really, but I’m sure ACS and AICHE have similar programming, and following that thread is probably a good way to figure out who’s interested
Assuming you are working at PNNL I agree they have a great program. One of the few places I've collaborated with that understood the upsides involved.
I do see more and more educational opportunities and attempts to be forward looking with this. They just always seem super undercooked like setting up an institute to encourage collaborating (but good luck working there at an early stage unless you're already a professor somewhere). Or more often only really open to current PhD students or postdocs if you're not already a professor.
I'll figure it out eventually, I just wish it didn't feel like I have to bootstrap the whole thing to get anything to happen.
I'm just sad that now that it might finally be possible for anyone to lead such an effort I don't have the stamina to do it.
Same. With a side of seeing senior scientists whose work was mediocre but who were well-connected surviving, while seeing senior scientists whose work was good failing to renew their grants.
Grant writing was also one of the aspects that most discouraged me from pursuing an academic career as well. I witnessed first hand the stress it induced in even the most capable professors and the level of result oriented thinking it mandated throughout the scientific process. Being a professor is a bit like being a lead contractor for NIH and NSF. If you want the resources (money) you need to chase where the fad is at. Failing that you will have to do a lot of teaching just to sustain yourself, and will cause your grad students to have a bad time throughout their career in your lab.
With all that said...the amount of academic freedom even within this flawed system is still greater than most other places I know of. Perhaps if you are a distinguished researcher working on your own terms and funded by one of the big tech companies things are better.
I am also supposed to have finished it months ago, but I really have no idea what I should write there. The current grant from my PI expires in two weeks, and then I have no funding
Yep, I finally landed my first grant as a co-PI two months after I left academia for corporate data sci. Amusingly, or whatever, of the three grants I had up for review as a co-PI or contributor, two finally got funded -- but I was gone.
I too considered the academic route and had some very interesting, concrete, and I think useful ideas of what to study. I was discouraged from it by existing Ph.D's who warned me about how absolutely brutal the system is and how hard it is to do anything.
I would love to do something meaningful, be it research or similar activity but I can't imagine constantly working knowing that the carpet can be pulled from underneath my feet any minute or that I constantly need to do political ballet at some university to make my living. It looks that there are thousands upon thousands in similar situations.
I had this shift as well. I met a prof who did some really cool research I was interested in but ultimately lost funding. His lab and basically his entire career went down the drain.
it's worse than that, especially at the beginning it is not your ability to receive grants that matters, but the ability to sycophant for the person that control the grant flows.
I got hired after helping an external consultant at my student job. I solved a task I was given one week time, within 2h by writing a simple scriot doing all the work. I only had to fix some few edge cases manually.
Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Our universities are proving to be a bottleneck.
I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to support.
That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people?
Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security.
We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries.
We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.
It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded research institutions that employ them, and put them to work on useful research without having them worry about grant considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing treadmill?
One possible reason is that highlighting funny or bad examples of taxpayer-funded research is valuable political fodder [1]. Plus, at least one wing of American politics is extremely against publicly funded stuff in general. Although I was happy to just discover that there's an apparently bipartisan "Golden Goose" award given annually to government-funded research that sounds silly but has proven to have meaningful applications [2].
It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win the government research funding for life lottery which obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that in the national labs although they need to worry about program funding like everywhere else. (Though military programs in particular are pretty secure.)
It used to be the case that doing science for most of the last 2000 years was a matter of deep curiosity and farnsworth-level application. Something , at least in the US, has changed.
What would you say is different from say 50 years ago ?
Why is it that now everything says "Made in China" while less than 40 years ago everything said "Made in USA" ?
Why does china have ~200 COVID19 vaccines while the US only has 3 or so ?
Going back to your thesis - I don't think the current situation is a fit for a government-mandated solution. I would think the exact opposite is true. I think the system today is exactly what results when you mix hard science with bureaucratic government procedure.
Science has taken several steps back due to government interference. You can't cure this patient by giving him a stronger dose of the same poison.
If anything , you simply need to think how we can remove all the bureaucracy and academia, out of science. Universities need to be decoupled from research. We need to get people to stop rewarding papers and grant-writing, and instead to start tinkering on their own, unhindered.
> instead to start tinkering on their own, unhindered.
But where do these money/resources come from? What stops somebody from "tinkering" in a way that does not produce any useful results, but is costing money?
The grant writing process sucks a lot. But it serves a purpose (albeit poorly) - that of weeding out people who aren't actually interested in producing output, but want the grant as "free money". Unfortunately, the grant writing process is costly (for the researchers), which takes the time away from the actual research.
Many of us deliver much of our results publicly all the time. At ORNL any user can come and use our facilities. We've got a neutron beam system which I think exists only in one other place on Earth. In fact, users can use it for free only if they pledge to publish their results publicly.
Unless you are in a user facility, national labs are even more brutal than academia. Because your entire salary is soft-money funded, and AFAIK you have to bring in several multiples (~4) of your salary in grants to maintain your position.
All that training, for money that you pay to the university.
From the point of view of that companies, the more people failing, the more profitable is their activity, as long as the supply of new people wanting to try it does not dry. There is a reason for the words "inspire", "young" and lately "women" having a prominent place and being repeated again and again in every newspaper or report about scientists.
We may not have a Bell Labs, but we have the entire complex of national laboratories which have pivoted from solely developing nuclear weapons towards more basic science.
I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are employed through them currently doing basic science funded by tax payers.
I'm employed in one of them and it is a very bureaucratic, political environment. Our facilities are dilapidated despite the billions in funding, resources are so wastefully spent, there's a lot of siloed equipment, a lot of unused equipment, and it's not unusual to see the lab fund the same project twice but run by different people. I would be so curious for an audit to be done to the lab just to see how misspent the money is.
This place I'm in is top-down research. The research ideas that one proposes have to be aligned with certain wishlists and pre-determined directions. It's not a place of innovation, but stagnation. This national lab feels more like a jobs program for phds, but with a sisyphean twist, it lacks vision.
I've worked at a few .. there's one that immediately comes to mind from your description, but some are much better than others at giving freedom to their staff to pursue their own ideas.
There is funding like LDRD which is meant to support ideas from the bottom up.
I’ve previously worked at one before and have since drifted away from basic research. At this point I am gravitating toward it again... in your opinion, what FFRDCs are best at providing that freedom / are less political?
My friend just started a job at LBNL and is loving it. LLNL is considered a great place to work as well. I can't speak to every single lab but I hear good things about working at both of them.
Bell Labs was one organization. While it's always a big blurry how much pure research goes on at corporate research labs, I'm not sure there isn't as much research going on today than there ever was given all the money especially in software out there.
Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had really come in to replace them.
Every community (families, neighbors, fandoms, friends, online chatrooms, religious groups, video game guilds...) has needs. What if smart people helped attend to the needs of the communities they're a part of rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a uniform way?
Bell Labs was 100% funded by the rents of a government-enforced monopoly.
Ma Bell spent its corporate lifetime fighting to prevent things like the Internet from happening. Bell Labs' job was to patent things like the answering machine so AT&T could prevent them from existing for as long as possible.
I, for one, am very very glad that Bell Labs no longer exists.
The public fails to get much science at all, not because they or the scientists are cheap, just neither one can afford the things that were always expceted to be within reach any more.
And the best part is that all this public money results in research papers that lie behind a private paywall. How have we allowed for this fraud to go on and on?
I have continued to publish and never have I been instructed to make the papers be open access. No one is enforcing that mandate. The research I've been a part of is wholly funded by the taxpayer and papers that I published after the mandate continue to not be freely available.
Umm...not sure what to tell you about that, other than you’re potentially out of compliance with the terms you and your institution agreed to.
I think there is a 6-12 month “exclusivity” period still, and some journals handle that automatically if you acknowledge federal funding. For example, Current Biology moved our stuff out from behind the paywall automatically on its publication anniversary.
I’m not sure if anyone has been sanctioned for not following these, but NIH progress reports/renewals require a PMCID for any papers you want to claim. You want to claim a lot on these to demonstrate productivity, so....there’s a good incentive to do this.
I'd say a better distinction is more important for the students. Teaching is a skill that the accumulation of knowledge doesn't inherently strengthen. Forcing researchers to teach against their will for professorship on the strict basis of knowledge typically causes the students to receive a lower quality education.
If we're talking about bottlenecks, I'd say the number of topics that are ruined for potentially great researchers by horrible lecturers is a bigger problem.
Sidenote - Writing about this topic reminded me of the lengths Andrew Ng went through to achieve excellence in his role of being a professor in all aspects of the job (in this case what he went through to become a better teacher):
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...
The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to have 10 people die due to disease and lack of access to treatments than to have one person die due to a faulty drug that the FDA let through. This attitude and approach means that the time to market is huge and highly resource intensive. The COVID vaccines were designed in less than a day. It took a year to reach market even under the ridiculously accelerated approval pace.
There's this loop in medical education where people come into it with lofty goals, but are then hit with $240k of tuition (excluding living expenses). They then take out loans on that, and then have to pay them back. So, when people talk about cutting salaries, there are all these new doctors that are going 'wait a minute, by this point I'm $300k (just on postgraduate training) in the hole after 4-years of hellish training, and I have to pay that back.'
If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.
> the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up
I used to believe this, but the AMA claims that it's actually the US Congress that is keeping the number of residencies low [1]:
> The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted policy at its Annual Meeting today to build upon its efforts aimed at modernizing and increasing funding for graduate medical education (GME). The new policy calls for the AMA to continue advocating for legislation that removes the caps on Medicare-funded residency positions, which were imposed by the Balanced Budget Amendment of 1997, to help ensure an adequate physician workforce to meet the nation’s growing needs for health care services.
I'm not an expert on this though, so it's possible that this is all PR doublespeak.
Part of the problem is that research positions tend to be for Ph.D. students and post-docs who cost less than permanent research scientists. This is good in the short term for the individual grant, but has the side effect that to continue research we have to produce more Ph.D.s than there are permanent fair-paying academic positions for.
Even though students are individually cheaper, I'm not totally convinced that a largely-trainee work force is really the most cost-effective overall[0].
My postdoc lab has gone through 3-4 (and counting) cycles of figuring out how to perform a certain type of experiment, only for the person doing it to move on. Having someone quasi-permanant to keep that knowledge around would not only let the experiments go a lot faster, but it'd save on very expensive, very fragile consumables.
[0] Not only are students/postdocs individually cheaper, but there are also lots more sources of funding for them, so it might even be rational for a lab or department, even if it's not actually true for the funder.
I finished my PhD in physics, and went straight into industry. After a bit of job hopping, I now help design scientific equipment.
I knew that I was not cut out to be a research superstar. I've had a good career with no regrets, have never had to work obscene hours, and live in a pleasant town.
We do have more prospectives for researchers. There’s industry which many go into. Most the time it even gives you much better financials, but the trade off is lower freedom in choosing your area of research.
To me it’s a fair trade off. If your in a big company with a high salary doing research you have to convince management if you want to start working with some new area of research and have them invest into it. If you are in academia you have to convince some grant issuing institution. Either way if you want to be a researcher it’s not enough that you are talented in doing the research itself. You also have to be able to write down your work in high quality, and communicate your past and current work, as well as future work plans in high enough quality to get someone to invest in you.
I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most academic departments.
Add to this that there is a lot of research that goes into production processes and translation from a basic-sciences setting to a production setting.
So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc.
It's all research, just not university-style research.
Another reason not to pursue university-style research is that historically a lot of scientific progress and even breakthroughs have occurred on the 'applied' side due to their access to reams of data and interest in process control and incremental refinement.
This reminds me if the story of Biontech cofounder and CEO Uğur Şahin. Being an immigrant child in Germany his teacher would no recommend him for high school despite his good grades. Şahin said that he only ended up in high school because a neighbor of his intervened at the school.
For those who are unaware of the German system, "high school" here presumably means the "Gymnasium" or similar track that prepares students for higher education, as opposed to the vocational dual education track that includes vocational schooling and apprenticeships.
Yes, you're right, the German system is a bit weird.
In a nutshell:
At the end of primary school your primary teacher recommends whether you should go to Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium. H. and R. ends after year 10 after which you're supposed to go to vocational school, but you can also switch to G if you're good enough. G ends after year 13 after which you can go to vocational school or university. H and R cannot go to university after year 10, they have to switch to G.
The primary school teacher's recommendation is usually not binding but most people follow it. There's a lot of proven bias against children of immigrants. For example, often these kids' language skills in primary school are poor leading to generally poor grades, but that could be fixed with a bit of extra work. But the teachers often don't have time or patience for that, there's no extra money for additional private teaching, so off to Hauptschule or Realschule it is.
In this data, the social standing/education of the parents has a big impact too, children of immigrant parents who went to higher education have an equally high recommendation to go to G., while kids of parents who had worse education do much worse in the post-primary school recommendations
This is generally correct and a huge problem.
Note that the details of the process differ quite a bit depending on federal state and decade. What may differ are things like duration of Gymnasium, whether recommendations are binding, whether there's a clear distinction between Hauptschule and Realschule, duration of primary school (e.g. 4 or 6 years), how easy it is to switch etc.
In my case, primary school was 4 years, recommendations were binding (!), so you basically got put on a rigid track based on one person's opinion when you were 10 years old.
Unsurprisingly, that leads to material biases based on parents' education and origin.
I'd like to add that in some states (e. g. Bavaria) it is very hard to change to a higher track (especially Gymnasium) after the decision in 4th grade. The importance of that decision on later life is hard to underestimate.
I have a degree in Molecular Biology but I've switched careers very specifically because of what is described in this article: you roll a die, it shows the wrong number and now your whole career is in jeopardy.
I just decided that it was not worth putting in years of 80 hour weeks into a system where at some point you can just "disappear" due to reasons very much out of your control.
Just writing these paragraphs reminds me how f****** broken academia is.
Here’s a prior article and HN thread on “Managing Academia” and it’s conclusion.
> If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability.
Please, that's such a copout. To "hire good people" you need to 1. attract and 2. identify them. If you don't create attractive conditions, good people will go elsewhere; if you do offer, say, financial incentives and personal prestige, bad people will flock too, so you need to identify good people. Further, the whole show is dynamic, good people can turn bad if wrong incentives exist, or you can lose them if more attractive alternatives present themselves.
So it all becomes a process problem, how to select, retain and reward good people. Which is exactly the problem impact factors, grants, publication metrics etc. try to solve, in an objective and reproducible manner. You might have a better system and results, but it's relevant only if it's not based on you personal nose and intuition to "hire good people".
This is particularly a problem for academic labs looking for bioinformatics specialists. Many of the bioinformatians I know with strong stats backgrounds have taken jobs at banks etc where the pay and benefits are significantly better. It's hard for academics to offer their staff something competitive to retain them. Moreover, people are realizing that so much of medical research is less about the patients and more about using their samples to get big papers with little impact on their prognosis
The best strategy to hire and train good bioinformaticians is to let them live where they want and involve them in world-spanning virtual groups. Pay them as well as can be allowed, which is not so great in terms of their fair market value in other fields, but with life flexibility that gives intangible benefits that are awesome. It's been said that having time flexibility with one's work is the surest way to increase our happiness and lifespan.
We need to move past the hierarchical model of staff/leadership to a fluid one in which everyone is respected and does the roles that they can and want to fill. This can happen in a distributed manner. Labs and groups which take a flexible attitude to these work relationships are and will be successful. Eventually it will catch on.
I agree with you. I think more PIs are realizing that. I know of some who have machine learning scientists that have second jobs in industry. They tolerate it because they still do everything asked of them well and in a reasonable time frame. I am not sure how they handle conflicts of interest though.
Well, it's no surprise that people optimize to the metric that's available, right? Private labs aim to make production things. Public labs aim to collect grants.
The only real hope for modern science is a business with a long-term view. That's because that business is only rewarded if their thing works.
If there was ever a time when public academics worked for science, it is no longer that today. Now it is occupied by grant vultures. This makes sense since we never rewarded science. We always rewarded a proxy. And in any sphere where you do that, eventually the proxy becomes the target as more sophisticated strategies evolve and each generation of participants gets better at optimizing against the proxy.
The follow on from this is rather more problematic. If you are prioritizing production things, then it means you'll severely limit the topics you explore. Anything that would take too long to get to market, or is too risky, or is too theoretical, will never be prioritized.
This is the reason for the tenure system, to give true freedom to explore novel and future oriented work. Things that won't pay off for decades, if ever. Ironically, the grant system does cut against it, especially with some grants now looking for more near term impact. Also, publish or perish cuts against this, because it optimizes for quantity rather than quality. Similar to industry labs, risky work or things that will take too long to get to publication are now discouraged. Instead we have a plethora of weak, simple, and short publications, often duplicating previous work due to a lack of consistency in terminology.
The other problem with the tenure system is that professors - even the ones that want to try cutting edge research and have tenure - cannot risk the career of the PhD students in their lab on some very speculative and high risk research that might backfire terribly.
> This is the reason for the tenure system, to give true freedom to explore novel and future oriented work. Things that won't pay off for decades, if ever
A long time ago, I heard the opposite view. Researchers only establish tenure once they've spent a long time on a specific path, and empirically, later-career don't suddenly throw out their decades of commitment to one path to explore ground once they're protected by tenure. This rings pretty true to me, based on everything I know about the scientific establishment (and my model of human psychology). There's a reason "science advances one funeral at a time" is such an old saw.
mRNA vaccines took ten years before they "made it" and they needed a black swan event to really take off. Moderna IPO'd eight years in.
I think this is a false premise that we have. That there is any long-term science going on at all in government labs that wouldn't happen in private labs. It's conventional wisdom but not likely to be true.
The market is very sophisticated now. There are players who make decisions outside of any human's life. There are instruments to insure against hundred year events, and it is possible to price both rare and far off successes.
If you've peeked behind the curtain you know there's a lot of fake science there, including photoshoppery of microscope images that's now considered science. It's out there, I've seen it, I know it's real.
Public labs have decoupled success from knowledge and, in doing so, many long-term fundamental science projects are now fake.
I see no evidence that China has organized around long-term discovery or technical brilliance. They have many scientists, and relative advantages in certain fields, but their system of science still has major structure issues.
For example, one aspect of Chinese science policy is paying scientists based on the impact factor of their published papers. This, however, has lead to a much larger issue of "salami-slicing"/"least-publishable unit" publications aimed at passing the minimum bar of a "good enough" journal rather than contributing to science. Another issue—these payouts are only given to certain authors of the paper, which can lead to issues and controversies over authorship position. These are issues in the U.S. and Europe, but less severe, and not incentivized with cash payments.
China does not have some secret sauce that makes them better at discovery or technical brilliance. If anything their policies are organized towards maximizing prestige. Whether large-scale competence follows prestige, we will have to wait to see.
I know some folk that studied abroad in China as part of their US-based undergraduate program (US faculty teaching their courses in China), and they had a very stressful experience due to the seemingly widespread amount cheating by the Chinese students throwing off the grading curves. The university seemed to ignore it for political reasons.
I guess we'll see. It will be hard to tease out the effects of what is public funding vs what is due to other factors.
I think that Chinese science will advance far more rapidly because the Western ethical schools have converged on the Do Nothing school of trolley problem solvers and rampant safetyism is ruining our ability to study immediately important dangers, that Western society is organizing towards protecting its power structures (overwhelmingly elderly over the young), and that the infantilization of Western populations leads to the inability to study interventions since no volunteer can be said to understand any risk.
On the other hand, while Chinese R&D spending is hockey sticking (see Red Moon Rising issue of The Economist for lots of info on this), I am 50-50 on whether they'll manage to solve their fakery problem faster than ours. Theirs is far bigger but they know it is a problem and it is smaller than we think. Ours is smaller but we don't think it exists and it is bigger than our governments think.
But pouring more money into a device that exists simply to extract money is clearly insufficient.
To reduce the focus of grant-funded labs on obtaining their next grant (i.e., ensuring their continued existence), funding organizations should deliberately force a soft cap on the number of research PIs. In the context of biomedical research, US universities have been on a hiring spree for the past 25 years. The number of BME departments increased 150% from 1995 to 2005. This expansion was partially funded by Whitaker Foundation money, which ended in 2006. Consequently, the NIH award rate for R01 grants, which are they main lab support mechanism, fell from 27% to ~ 15%. Naturally, funding a lab in a 15% award rate environment takes much more time (probably 3× more; it's nonlinear due to competition), to the detriment of time spent on research and training. This has a corrosive effect on every aspect of publicly-funded science.
The NIH has strong leverage to correct this. Grant awards include both "direct" and "indirect" costs. Direct costs go to the applicant (PI). Indirect costs go to their /institution/ (employer). Indirect costs are calculated relative to direct costs, generally 70% (so the total awarded sum is 170% of direct costs), but the rate is negotiated and institution-specific. The NIH could penalize institutions with too many soft money (grant-supported) positions by reducing those institutions' indirect cost rates, or even requiring institutional matching, until the number of grant-supported positions falls to a level at which they can place their main focus on doing the work they are nominally funded to do. This would reduce the number of publicly-funded scientists, but would let them act more like scientists and less like marketers.
> The only real hope for modern science is a business with a long-term view. That's because that business is only rewarded if their thing works.
There are limits to that logic though. For example, the business can spend billions on researching more addicting cigarettes or can direct money to drugs which merely manage the disease instead of curing it (as disease management makes you a customer for life).
With respect to the products developed, this is an issue where the incentives of business and industry need to be aligned. Resolving the problem can be as simple as paying more for drugs That cure opposed to treat.
I know fraudulent science is performed in many university labs. If you read the papers you will see only what you think is science. But the results are falsified. The slides are fake. So maybe output is high but determining what is true output is hard.
And nearly no one replicates. I'm sorry that I can't give you info. It's not useful to me or my family to prove this. But consider this a warning. If you move subtly enough you might be able to ask the right people without triggering the defensive walls.
I know I sound like a crank, so I understand if your weight on this warning is not high. But it feels wrong to not warn. So I've done my duty to the extent I find comfortable.
FWIW I believe in the scientific process, and I very much like the idea of long-term fundamental science. I'm not a Trumper, or an anti-science loon, or someone who rejects modern epistemology.
I've spent many years in the academic spaces, both in public genetics labs as well as in computer science departments. I've never encountered anything like what you claim, and no one I know in academia has either. Extraordinary claims like yours need proof, no one will or should take you at your word, especially when there is the weight of many others experiences that cut against your claims.
Scientific scam (or scientific mistake, not necessarily deliberate) is well documented in fact. It seems that >1800 published articles were retracted in 2020 by scientific journals, including 72 related with covid [1] so, maybe is not common, but yes, sometimes it happens. There is nothing extraordinary in that idea. The ideology that requires scientists to be a replacement for the figure of the religious saint is stupid.
[1] An example: 5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells. Biological Regulators & Homeostatic Agents. July 16, 2020. "showed evidence of substantial manipulation of the peer review"
I never claimed it doesn't happen, it's trivial to see that it occasionally does. The OP seemed to be suggesting that it was rampant and widespread, which I have a very hard time believing. Especially to the level of outright fabrication, rather than sloppy work or presenting subsets of real data in a dishonest way.
That's okay. I understand why you need to apply a near zero multiplier on what I told you but I'm unwilling to get any family member blackballed over outing anyone.
Your epistemological strategy is correct. And for all I know you are more correct. After all, given any random arrangement of points there will be clusters. And assuming you draw circles randomly, some circles will coincidentally appear full of points. But if the circle is the space of visibility of a sapient being, they will mistakenly determine that all of space is full of points simply based on their own circle.
So just because my immediate circle has encountered this enough may not mean that this is common.
Unfortunately, there is no true way for us to safely exchange information on this front for the positive case (there is fraud), only for the negative case (there is no fraud). So I guess we each act as if this circle is the entire plane and maybe the world will apply sufficient pressures to tease out who is right.
FWIW, I believe your anecdote. It doesn’t mean it happens everywhere all the time. You’re posting with your real name and I can’t think of why you’d come to HN to lie about it. I value reading about personal experiences on HN.
Hey, sorry, I googled but he has a lot of work and I couldn't find where he talks about fraud (or lack thereof) in science. If you have a link handy would you mind sharing?
I have been thinking recently how to reform the science system here in germany, which is somewhat similar to the system in the US. What I think is impossible is to completely eliminate the grant chasing for the early career scientist. It's just that there's more supply than demand in a lot of sciences and not everyone can make it, if we try to give everyone a grant we end up with grants that are not really paying for anything.
What I think would be an improvement would be a different system where there's a clear path from grant-based funding to a continuous stream of funding, with different funding levels, where one gets periodically reviewed and demoted/continued/raised, so your funding does not completely dry up after a few year (I imagined it like the sports leagues, where you play in different levels and depending on your performance you get relegated from the league) and you can really plan long-term. So one can continue the competitiveness and the role of funding bodies/institutions where the scientist work at while giving them the ability to plan long-term and maybe pursue more risky ideas.
There will always be the ones that fall through the cracks. We somehow need to figure out who to give the money to and we will end up with someone who deserved but did not get the money. I don't know who reviews the grant in the US, but here at least with some funding bodies the scientist manage it themselves (dfg) and I don't think one can easily improve on it.
This is a common problem in many commodity markets. If creating new supply is inexpensive, and all market participants have functionally equivalent technology and operational expertise. New supply will always emerge to eat away any margin that a market participant may have. (Think Restaurants, farming, small-time delivery/construction, uber driving)
If you follow this through to the extreme you end up with a vicious cycle of boom/bust where any demand opportunity that emerges is crushed under 10x the supply increase. The market becomes unstable as new participants have clean balance sheets and older participants go into debt that cannot be paid. Supply is only maintained through the addition of new market participants willing to lose their capital or burn their balance sheet on debt in a private parallel to the tragedy of the commons.
One traditional solution that keeps these markets stable, and market participants from simply bankrupting every few years is to introduce an artificial supply cap. In construction, and small business markets this task is often performed by the zoning board, or a local licensing board. In the case of larger markets participants may form cartels such as in OPEC, Maple Syrup, or international shipping.
In the case of science, the task of supply control traditional fell on admissions committees and the availability of permanent tenure tracked professorships. This mechanism broke down with the introduction of non-tenure track positions, and the external funding of grad-students. Universities now have every incentive to flood the market with vastly more scientists than can reasonably be funded - which combined with the inherent riskiness of scientific research means we have a combination of science "bankruptcies" and low-risk, low-quality academic research to show for it.
I'd much rather see fewer tenured professors ridiculed for their oddball research than an army of post-docs and grad students performing meaningless research which is suitable for publishing.
> If you follow this through to the extreme you end up with a vicious cycle of boom/bust where any demand opportunity that emerges is crushed under 10x the supply increase. The market becomes unstable as new participants have clean balance sheets and older participants go into debt that cannot be paid. Supply is only maintained through the addition of new market participants willing to lose their capital or burn their balance sheet on debt in a private parallel to the tragedy of the commons.
I am in the same position. First completely self driven research project end in two different academic spend about 80k each fighting over which of them controlled the IP (the decided to share it), and totally fail to commercialize it (the both kept asking me how to do it while I had zero financial incentive). Second after a successful grant funding project which I was told I could not PI because I had not yet completed my PhD, while I was the lead inventor and developer on for 2 years and getting zero naming on the publications. I left academic to make almost twice as much at a soul crushingly boring job. I really felt like I was working on something important but hated the grant funding cycles (I was told if I wanted one I would have to write it in my own time and could not ask for support), and was tired of seeing people up and down the ladder claim ownership of my ideas and work.
Maybe if someone's passionate enough they can fund their own science? Surely you could have earned 80k quickly enough in your private sector job. Similar to poets and artists who usually get paid nothing for a long time/ever.
Oh, maybe I misread you. They spent 80k just on fighting for IP rights?
> universities ... expect faculty in the medical schools to pay their own way with either clinical work or external research funding. This puts tremendous financial pressure on eager young medical researchers, sometimes leading them not to the projects that are most needed or that they are most passionate about, but to the projects that will get them funding.
Sometimes it feels as if the current system we have in the US is the worst ever devised for solving the "long-term research" problem --- that is, except for all the other systems that have been tried in the past.
How do we, as a society, do better by scientists pursuing research that could take many years or decades to pay off?
If you fund less science, you will favor older researchers (that cost more) because they are the ones thay can produce more and have inertia from previous research project, and they know how to game the system. Thats a big issue with the NIH (in US) that they are trying desperately to solve. Unfortunately, they also often favor and give too much weight to old researchers in their grant panels and they tend to favor (not always consciously) people that think like them.
this is why we decentralize so that that billion can instead be a thousand millions, and we try a bunch of options in parallel rather than consolidating power in a flawed few, no matter how accomplished those few are (statistically, the consolidated few will always be relatively flawed to the parallel many).
In my country the R&D budget is quite small in the first place, and there were huge cuts during the 2008 crisis.
The result of the cuts was mainly that the mafias, old researchers with political influence, and people who are experts in gaming the system got to keep their funding. In general, newcomers, young researchers, and genuinely good researchers who aren't that good at gaming the system suffered the most.
No, the truth is that these problems are caused precisely by the insane levels of competitiveness for funding - and solutions must reduce that level of competitiveness for funding, not increase it.
Give money to brilliant scientists with no strings attached.
Let scientists among themselves figure out who is brilliant. If the system gets corrupted, a second group of scientists will emerge who claim to be the real deal. Let them battle it out and choose the smarter group for further funding.
In other words, do it the way it was done before the influx of the administrative overhead.
>If the system gets corrupted, a second group of scientists will emerge who claim to be the real deal. Let them battle it out and choose the smarter group for further funding.
Would this involve an application? Perhaps a committee?
Why doesn't someone just make a browser extension that forces you to read the contents of your comment before you submit it? Then we just bundle it in browsers.
Edit: Hmm, seems I plagiarised https://xkcd.com/481/, but worse. I'm glad I rarely write the first thing that comes into my head.
Given "Planck's Principle"of "Science progresses one funeral at a time", it does not seem that scientists within the system will be the best to figure out who should be favored over them.
That second group cannot emerge if it does not have funding. Einstein was 'lucky' in that he had his job as a patent clerk that allowed him his theoretical studies until he finally found his way into an acedemic career.
Battle it out how? Colosseum fight to the death with giant beakers for weapons? Someone makes the decisions on which group is smarter and that person is thus an administrator of the system. They will in turn hire out sub-administrators to better manage the various groups of scientists and then create a system of grants to remove the inefficiency (and slowness) of groups battling it out. And here we are.
One thing I think about: How would American medical research be different under communism?
Honestly, the early phases would be pretty much the same. There would be researchers who want grants to do experiments and to get the grants they would need to impress boards of their peers. So basically the system we have today.
This is the only strategy, in my opinion, that makes sense. Every year, a certain fraction of the grant money from NSF/NIH/DOE will be awarded randomly, based on a lottery. Your name is automatically entered into the lottery if you submitted a grant proposal. The money per random grant will be constant; there will be no strings attached to the budget regarding scientific direction.
Avery Oswald died without winning the Nobel, in spite of proving that DNA is the hereditary material (it was thought that amino acids were at the time). Many held him back including his own supervisors. Science is sometimes shit.
Yes, this is a very sad story and here is a passage from Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book "The Gene"
...Avery was still denied the Nobel Prize because Einar Hammarsten, the influential Swedish chemist, refused to believe that DNA could carry genetic material...
The academic process at a research university from student to researcher to professor is cutthroat. There are so many obstacles in the way: classes designed to weed you out, GPA requirements, the grad school application process, financial instability as a PHD candidate, difficult job opportunities after the doctorate, fighting for funding and tenure, and more. Major reform is needed to progress science, because the current system is a failure pipeline that hurts both researchers and the university (which is shooting itself in the foot).
I think it is a fair question how to organize science for best results (maximum productivity ?). I am no fan of pressure to apply for grants, which is particularly strong in the US. Also the amount of pressure/effort needed to get permanent/tenured position is very large. While this is clearly a big drain on people, and some people cannot handle it, either because they don't play the game well, or just live/work balance, or politics, but I think it certainly forces people to work more/harder. If we make things more relaxed, I'm sure that will make life easier for many scientists, but I would think the overall productivity will go down. I don't honestly know whether that's right path or not.
The quest for "maximum productivity" is the root cause for all of this. We need more artists and academics and less capitalists. Short-sighted thinking with profits being the end goal doesn't make for good science, good engineering or long term growth. The quest for productivity is a highly flawed path.
Productivity in this context is also defined by what makes the most wealthy and powerful more wealthy and powerful.
The old argument is that capitalism as is aligns with the people so when it benefits you benefit. As businesses optimize out those pesky alignment costs with society, this becomes less true.
Now, how would you tell if overall productivity went down?
The problem at hand is that we measure "overall productivity" via the proxy of "the number of articles a panel of other scientists considered interesting enough". Everyone who has dipped a toe in academia can tell you how bad that is at even remotely correlating with producing actual value.
But, the actual value of a piece of research often comes to light decades after it has been first published. Rutherford has been at it since 1911, but we only got first value out of his theory in 1940s. Man-millenia have been invested in the meantime. Would this be any better, if all of them had to spend half of their time working on securing funding?
I don't think it forces people to work harder, for me at least, it is a deterrent. As a master's student, I am not willing to get into the rat race that is academia with other people dictating what I should do research in because that is the current hot topic. I would rather work and do research in my own time on topics that I like at the pace that I dictate.
I should note that I am able to follow that approach because my areas of interest do not require lab equipment besides a workstation and notepads to scribble things on, my research is in ML and it won't yield anything remotely as ground breaking as Dr. Karikó's.
Productivity is a metric and the moment you use for _whatever_ will be gamed. This is just the natural course of things. The main problem is that productivity, when it comes to research, is a lousy metric. Eventually productivity will be linked to "the market", because that's what matters right?
Would Riemann frame that hypothesis had he been driven by "productivity" ? I wonder.
I think the biggest question here is to what extent can productivity in basic research be quantified. Or, what are the value to failed experiments and explorations of "out there" ideas? Basic research is tricky because it is at the periphery of human knowledge, so getting our bearings there is difficult. The focus should, you are right, be on "overall productivity" and not on individual productivity, but the question is how do we make decisions about individuals based on overall productivity goals.
Science these days has many problems and this is one of them. Securing grants to finance your further way is crucial. But mostly hard work is only appreciated if there are good, valid and reproducable results.
I discovered another problem while wrting my master thesis and it's also pretty hard to determine good and valid results from papers. There are so many papers out there that are not reproducable especially in computer science. Or the paper is missing very important facts that would help you to reproduce results.
I think there should be a system to remove or mark papers as non-reproducable to prevent wasted time.
As a math person and technical person, I find myself so glad that I stayed out of academics and dropped out of my masters program to start a company.
This story is exceptionally inspiring because it speaks that we need people that are passionate to focus without worry of basics.
We need true believers to throw their lives at a hard problem.
The challenge is money. It is so easy to waste. It is so easy to squander on dead ends. This ease makes people conservative and less bold because we make it so hard to get.
It's clear we don't have a good system. I had hopes that I could pursue my passions within big companies by climbing the ladder, and that hasn't worked out.
Fortunately for myself, I can retire at any moment and throw my life at my silly programming language: http://www.adama-lang.org/
Perhaps, there is wisdom in teaching finance to everyone such that people can focus on productive existing problems that yield fruit. This helps contextualize people towards present day concerns and the nature of problems. Then, if people leverage the beauty of wall st then more scientists can throw their lives towards good problems.
I don't know, but I'm sure many of us wish we could align funding with passions without the need to build a company.
It's pretty easy to see who is a top star (because they have continuous highest-quality output), and who will never deliver anything worthwhile.
The trouble is the continuum between those two extremes. This domain is dominated by politics, endless grant applications, bureaucracy. Nobody can really tell where you belong in this continuum, maybe not even you yourself. And I also don't believe that academia is the best place to pursue your ideas anymore, anyway.
Is Yi Cui with an h-index close to 200 the best scientist then? Or Pulickel Ajayan?
I worked with samples grown from both of them, so my opinion on them is mixed. They are drive-by shooters; they identify a hot area, publish some crappy but early papers on the topic and move on to the next hot trend. Both of them have very little to zero sustained contributions to the field.
And this is, by the way, the case for most h-index superstars. Fundamental contributions are often sustained contributions over the years to a field, and the honest answer is that we can measure that only years after the science has been published.
I have no clue about your field, so I don't know. But it seems to me it is obvious to you if you want to include them in your list of top stars.
Note also that I never said anything about h-index being a measure for highest-quality. Only experts in a field can say what obvious highest-quality work is.
I am talking about the ones where it is obvious that they are or will be doing exceptional work. That can be 10 years into their career, or at year 0 of their career.
When this is not obvious, which most of the time it isn't, that's where the tough to judge continuum lies.
Unfortunately for some fields it is difficult to do anything outside of a lab. And startups are not a good solution either with the incentive to make money fast that shift the incentives. I would be interested in knowing what other places you are thinking about.
Yes. I don't have a good solution either. In the end you need to somehow get the money to do what you want to do. That may be within academia or not. In my case, I am just doing freelance jobs and reserving as much time as I manage to do the research I want to do. I don't need many resources, and being able to access sci-hub helps a lot.
Dr. Katalin Karikó, the scientist mentioned in the article, is now a senior vice-president at BioNTech, the German company that developed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
She is also adjunct professor at the same University of Pennsylvania, where these events happened.
I am in the middle of this right now; new professor at top-10 university in CS (with a PhD in biomedicine). Funding science is a frequently-debated topic and everyone is aware there is a problem, but one part is that in the US we have combined four different organizations: federally-funded scientific research organizations, post-highschool education, vocational training (doctors, lawyers), and professional sports.
People think a LOT about the broken science incentives and write a lot about it, but progress is hard. On one hand, it's hard to facilitate what you can't measure, but many pushes towards scientific "metrics" feel a bit like trying to quantify artistic output: is the number of paintings/sculptures/etc the right thing to evaluate people on? What about popularity? What about popularity amongst art critics vs the general public?
The more I think about it the more I think we need to explicitly recognize the need for a diversity of sources _and_ structures. For people who don't know, here's an outline of funding sources. The metrics will be in grad-student-years (think ~$70k) because overhead/indirect-costs/etc. vary wildly. Yes, most of these orgs (esp the NSF) just want to fund labor, and there's an expectation that a lot of it is "training" labor.
- NSF: The big one for non-biomedical STEM, maybe $8B/yr. "normal" grants tend to be small, say 2 grad students for three years. But once you get the grant you can do whatever you want with it within reason. The grants are reviewed by "study sessions" where a team of your peers sit around and rank the grants.
- NIH: Budget is $32B/yr (4x the NSF), and very clinically focused. The staple, the R01, funds ~4 PhD students for 5 years. These are very hard to get and generally go to more senior PIs. It's common for faculty to get their first R01 AFTER they have tenure (7-years into the job, say 40 years old). Once you get the grant you can do whatever you want with it within reason. But the bar for getting one often requires you to have "preliminary data" which is effectively 30% of what you were proposing anyway. As funding gets tighter and more people apply, orgs have responded by becoming more conservative, pushing these preliminary-data-expectations even higher. Note that the NIH is very aware of these problems, and is trying to address them, but the entire infrastructure is dedicated to effectively brutal stack-ranking. Every time they suggest things like "maybe famous professors shouldn't have more than 6 of these grants" there's a lot of community pushback. Maybe they're not wrong? Maybe it is better to give Ed Boyden or George Church effectively a blank check.
- DOD (non-DARPA) : Various orgs like the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Labs, etc. fund a LOT of basic science. Each one has several long-standing "program managers" who are former scientists that have an agenda for the sorts of things they want to fund. A lot of this funding is dependent on how excited you can get the PM. Think of this like pitching an Angel investor. If you get in good with a PM they can fund you at a decent rate for a long time!
- DARPA : I have a soft spot in my heart for DARPA because the model is so different from the other orgs. A DARPA Program Manager 1. can only work there for 4 years (to prevent personal relationships between PMs and "performers" getting too cosy" 2. Generally is in charge of one to three programs during the course of their tenure. A "program" is a very specific research thrust with a lot of money behind it ($20-80m). They are CONTRACTS, not grants, meaning that the PM expects you to actually hit deliverables AND they can yank the funding at anytime. But they have had some great hits and deep pockets. When I almost went to be a PM it was pitched as "like being CEO of your own science startup". I don't think that's quite right, but it's not totally wrong either. Other fun facts include it can take two years to get a program off the ground, meaning the PM that STARTS a program is probably not the one that finishes it, so three years into your project you suddenly have a new boss.
- HHMI Investigators: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a MASSIVE philanthropic organization that funds biomedical research in the US. Two main mechanisms come to mind: HHMI Investigators, where they identify promising young scientists in academia and give them like $10m ($2m/5years? $1m/10 years? not sure the exact numbers) so they DONT HAVE TO CHASE GRANTS. Many HHMI investigators go on to win Nobel prizes and stuff, although the causal influence is murky (did the HHMI money let them do great work or is HHMI just good at picking winners?)
- HHMI Janelia : Evidently HHMI had so much money that they opened a CAMPUS in the mid-2000s outside of DC where they have 40 labs. Each Janelia "group leader" gets up to 6 employees (mostly postdocs, staff, a few grad students) and effectively an unlimited budget BUT you are evaluated based on publications/resources used. That is, unlike at a university (where if you spend $10m to get one nature paper, it's great! you got a nature paper! And in fact the university _likes_ that you spent more money because they get a cut) Janelia cares about the resources. Also groups can't grow huge (because of headcount limit) so you're encouraged to invest in capital and tech over labor. The catch? NO TENURE. You're renewed every 5 years, and whole research programs are sunset over 15 year timespans (this is new).
- National Labs: A lot of great science happens at national labs, but due to their legacy of nuclear stewardship they can be difficult places to do science (men with guns at the front of the complex!) Still if you're looking for a place to do mostly-science without chasing grants TOO much, and are willing to trade some autonomy to do good work, they seem like a reasonable place. They invest a lot in HPC as well if you're into that sort of thing. Not that much biomedicine though.
I love that there are so many different options, but I still think it's bad that SO MUCH of it happens in straight-up university settings. As I said I'm a new professor and the overhead of teaching and grant writing, coupled with the pandemic, really have me down and brainstorming other options.
That's a pretty accurate description of the national labs complex. It is part of the military industrial complex and it offers financial security in exchange of personal and professional freedoms. It is very difficult for one to get their ideas funded unless they align with research directions that come from the top, which are rarely inspiring.
I wish the legacy of the nuclear stewardship program could be separated into its own thing and fund the creation of a separate, open campus that can attract and recruit more talent to work on more innovative research directions. A place of greater transparency and openness. It's never gonna happen but I can dream!
National Lab scientist here. Too much of a revolving door has led to most National Labs becoming like universities now. LBNL is now effectively a UC Berkeley division (check it, their Lab directors, associate directors, division directors are all Berkeley faculty).
Secondly, DOE now is obsessed with the same productivity metrics, which flows down from the Congress. Dollars per paper has become the metric - which means you are trying to tighten the productivity screws all the time.
For example, I had five papers last year and was just barely FC (fully contributing) and narrowly escaped getting written up for unsatisfactory productivity. Even worse, unlike tenure, national lab scientist positions are entirely soft money funded. This state of affairs results in a situation where you need to be bringing in over half a million dollars per year to pay your salary+overhead if you are a famous person.
Unfortunately this isn't restricted to science. Just about any project that can't show metric X is increasing at the next quarterly/annual review is going to have some difficulty proceeding.
Truly massive projects that can be measured in large fractions of a human lifespan are exceptionally rare.
> Truly massive projects that can be measured in large fractions of a human lifespan are exceptionally rare.
We still get massive projects, but they proceed like evolution: every step has to have a benefit. (Even if the part that step plays in the final product is not what gives it the immediate benefit.)
I want to say something about how messed up this system is... I spent many years as a grad student in economics and especially engineering. Not sure what to say though, my trajectory was pretty non-standard. From where I sat, the academic path looked like a meat grinder, and Econ. and Eng. are easier to break into academia than, e.g. biology, I have no doubt.
Aside, I’ve found my fill of god awful meat grinders in industry before and since, but I have no doubt the “existential career threat by default, high probability of failure no matter how good you are” methodology is the wrong way for civilization to progress.
>It is unbelievably, brutally difficult for all of the other non-science skills that are needed but not explicitly taught: writing grants (“grantsmanship”), getting invited to speak at conferences, building collaborative research relationships, having the political awareness to attract allies and mentors within a department or university who can help find support for you.
it is the same everywhere - be it political/government system or who gets to be a big architect, director or VP in a tech company. An ounce of political savvy and BS skills beats a kilogram of technical skills and expertise.
This is probably going to be unpopular on this forum, but why is everyone assuming that having more researchers is desirable / needed in the first place?
I think scientific research is completely bloated already and there's no need to provide work for even more researchers who will either (1) research an already popular subject where ever growing funding yields ever disminishing returns or (2) research an utterly futile subject that serves no purpose beside justifying the researcher's salary.
Went from 15 years experience as a financial software engineer to a junior researcher position in the local university, while working towards a biomedical PhD. Was never happier.
When I hear a story like this, the first thing I want to know about is how the incentives are structured.
The author makes a great point, which is that medical research is expected to pay its own way. So the next question I'm looking to answer is "Why is that?" What is it about the way we structure this research that made it make sense to U Penn to underfund mRNA research?
Not all medical research works exactly as described in the article. Reading between the lines, Dr. Karikó had what's called a "research faculty" appointment, which basically means you don't need to teach but do need to pay your salary (and the salary of anyone employed in your lab) from grants. This is sometimes called a "soft money" position to reflect its precarious nature. This is in contrast to standing faculty, who are paid 9 months of their salary from the university operating budget, but must teach during those 9 months, leaving less time for research. The research faculty appointments exist because NIH grant money is plentiful, allowing more positions to exist than can be supported from the university operating budget alone. Essentially, researchers are permitted to bet their job on their ability to obtain grant money. Turn off the supply of grant money and the research faculty positions go away too. Most would not be replaced by standing faculty positions.
The depressing reality is that it is mostly impossible to predict which basic research projects will prove to be essential in 25 years. I think people try anyway because basing funding awards / rejections on a nominally objective evaluation of project importance lends some emotional distance to the process.
If hospitals were paid by patient outcome instead by procedure, it may create a financial incentive to use some of the organization's operating budget for applied research. But that wouldn't do much to help basic research with unclear future application such as the mRNA work.
Flip side -- the pioneering research may not have been possible without govt funding of science through a grant based system. Imo the right conclusion here is to increase govt funding massively. Unclear to me how to not do it based on a grant system. Even in the industry you need to do project proposals to keep your team funded.
Clickbait. All these normative comments sound similar. They don't call it work for nothing. Stellar scientists make breakthroughs regardless of obstacles. Just because you get a piled high and deep doesn't mean you are capable of breakthroughs. Not everyone is stellar.
Wow, there is a lot of negativity towards science in this thread. Um, yeah, it could be better. But it's mostly a matter of personal courage. Of course institutional funding is not the best incentive for the best science. Good science comes from courageous individuals in courageous communities. Not financial incentives. Good science takes courage.
We would rightfully mock a company that said that its turnover problem, its innovation problem, or its project failure problem was due to a lack of courage among its workers.
Guys, you dont get it. Science isn't government work. In fact, to the extent that it is bureaucracy work, it is doing fine. But it is so much bigger than that.
I agree with 'courage', but the problem is that it all depends on the courage of the people with money rather than the courage of the researcher. Someone has to take the risk and hire you for a tenure track position, and someone has to choose you over someone else (from a better school? with a more en-vogue topic?) for giving out grant money. Ideally it should be a meritocracy, but how do you prove in advance what is good research? And I guess, then it often boils down to 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM'.
