Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Chapter 5 Implications of the Findings
Chapter 5 Implications of the Findings
Pages 63-78
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From page 63... ...
This year's PhD recipient is on the average 32 years old. With degree in hand, he or she will probably join an ever-growing pool of postdoctoral fellows now estimated at about 20,000 persons to engage in research while obtaining industry, or government decreased from 89% in the 1973 survey to 62% in the 1995 survey'.
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From page 64... ...
The result has been an economical and highly effective workforce whose research productivity is excellent and whose salary costs are comparatively low. The intellectual fluidity and scientific productivity of the life sciences rests to a great extent upon this cadre of postdoctoral fellows who, with graduate students, operate within the tradition of laboratories that are funded through highly competitive grants to principal investigators for the pursuit of their scientific ideas.
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From page 65... ...
ADMINISTRATORS AND ESTABLISHED RESEARCHERS Leaders of industrial or government laboratories, university administrators, teachers in large undergraduate programs where extensive laboratory work is performed, and established lifescience researchers who must compete for renewed funding are likely to argue that the current situation has much to offer; their motivation to promote change is weak or absent. Both the time-consuming experiments that are characteristic of much biologic research and the education of large numbers of undergraduates are well suited to the skills and training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
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From page 66... ...
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS Finding a postdoctoral position is normally not difficult because many such jobs are available. The compensation of life-science postdoctoral fellows is, however, only marginally better than that of graduate students, and the quality of the benefits remains low.
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From page 67... ...
Yet success rates in obtaining grants have decreased for young investigators as they have for investigators of all ages. The situation has been ameliorated to some extent by the existence of other sources of research money that are available explicitly for young people, such as grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Searie Foundation, formerly from the Markey Trust, and now from both the Burroughs Welicome Fund, and the American Cancer Society, which is focusing its scientif~c-grants program on young people.
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From page 68... ...
More than 50 letters were received; some were written by senior investigators, but most came from graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young independent scientists. More recently, the committee held a public hearing in Washington and invited members of the lifescience community to present their views at the hearing and electronically through e-mail.
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From page 69... ...
FACTORS AFFECTING THE FUTURE VITALITY OF THE LIFE-SCIENCE ENTERPRISE One important aspect of America's current training system for life scientists is beyond dispute: it is inherently expansionist and is not at steady state. The significant contributions of young people to the life-science enterprise have made them so attractive to the senior members of the profession that the rates of training have continued to increase while the number of people still in postdoctoral positions, without any immediate prospect of permanent research positions, is also increasing.
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From page 70... ...
But it would be irresponsible to ignore the signs that our existing PhD production is perhaps too large and that there is an imbalance in the population of life scientists compared to available positions. The signs include the lengthening of time to graduate-degree receipt and the increases in the duration and number of postdoctoral positions.
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From page 71... ...
STRATEGIES FOR OPTIMIZING GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL TRAINING MAXIMIZING THE RETURN ON FUNDS INVESTED IN TRAINING The stipend and tuition of US-trained graduate students in the life sciences are supported by a variety of mechanisms, as described in chapter 2, including training grants, fellowships, and teaching and research assistantships. About half the students are employed as research assistants.
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From page 72... ...
Those results are equivocal in that training grants are awarded only to programs that are already providing a superior education or have attracted students of superior ability. The alternative explanations cannot be ruled out, and the prominence of highly ranked institutions on the roster of those receiving training grants lends them added plausibility.
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From page 73... ...
. Unlike the training grants and fellowships awarded to individuals, the quality of graduate training provided through this mechanism is not monitored by any agency outside the individual university.
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From page 74... ...
The authors concluded that "it is safe to say that regardless of field, the odds of commencing research for which a Nobel prize is awarded decline dramatically after age 40, and very, very few laureates undertake prize-winning work after the age of 55." Fingre 5.! Number of US life-science PhDs in tenured positions, by age, 1975, 1985, 1995 soon 4000 3000 a, 2000 1000 Cat Data Mom table 5.1.
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From page 75... ...
They also identified the ability to approach a problem from a fresh perspective unfettered and unbiased by previous experience and the freedom of having little to lose from being wrong. Today, life scientists are still in dependent positions well into their 30s; often they are working on research projects designed by their mentors rather than on projects that they designed themselves.
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From page 76... ...
For example, a recent retrospective survey of 192 recipients of the -- - f ~ ~ / // 01 ~ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 > ~9 3~ 33 AS 3> 39 ~ ~3 AS ~> ~9 ~ So SO So So ~ ~3 AS ~> ~9 >' >3 AS '~'30'3~'3~'3~'3~ To ~ ~ ~ ~ So So SO So SO To ~ ~ ~ ~ To >~ > Age 1, prestigious awards from the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences which identifies promising assistant professors and other research scientists at the beginning of their careers, indicated that their average time to the PhD degree was only 5 years and the duration of their postdoctoral training 3.9 years. The current system has not substantially hampered the rapid progression of these young scientists through training to independent positions, so, at least in this case, it is fulfilling one of its highest priorities: the production of a cadre of truly innovative scientists.
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From page 77... ...
University faculty search committees report hundreds of applications for single positions. Competition among postdoctoral fellows for limited employment opportunities is considered by some to be an ideal way to bring out the best in each person and to select the best people for the jobs.
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From page 78... ...
It behooves the profession to act in an intelligent and balanced way so that a future crisis will be avoided. If the difficulties of finding appropriate employment become sufficiently widespread, the discontent of postdoctoral fellows might infect undergraduates, who are considering graduate education in life sciences, and result in a decline in high-quality applications.
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