OK, that’s just a little Rutgers inside joke—Bill Nye, The Science Guy, gave the commencement address, representing the “end” of your undergraduate education, at least if you graduated this year. But seriously, the topic of this blog is a website based on two articles that use phrases like:
“…doing nothing is not an option. The stakes are enormous: the current environment is beginning to erode…” (Alberts et al, PNAS, February 17, 2015, vol. 112, no. 7, 1912–1913)
and
“…recipe for long-term decline…” (Alberts et al, PNAS April 22, 2014, vol. 111, no. 16, 5773–5777)
You might assume that these phrases refer to anthropogenic global warming or ecosystem destruction. You’d be wrong. These articles refer to the state of biomedical research in the United States.
According to these articles, every labor economist who has studied the pipeline for the biomedical workforce since the early 1990’s, has proclaimed it to be “broken.” Too many researchers are competing for too few academic positions and too few funding dollars, leading to a disadvantageous research environment. If you are a biomedical researcher, you may already know a lot about the challenges now facing us. If so, just skip to the bottom for a link to a website that asks for your help in solving the problems. If you don’t already know about these challenges, I’ll get you up-to-speed here, and you should also view this video!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y4sSLyL3oWw
Nowadays, academic researchers who are competing for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding are rewarded for proposals that promise a “sure thing,” which necessarily precludes the creative and logical leaps that are necessary for game-changing discoveries. This is thought to produce research that slows discoveries to tiny incremental steps. The NIH is also perceived to unfairly reward “translational” research, which will rapidly go from the bench to the bedside for treatment of actual human patients, at the expense of basic research that illuminates the molecular underpinnings of biological processes. In some ways, this bias makes sense: if you are suffering from a disease, you don’t care how a medicine works, you just care that it DOES work. But how do you find new medicines without a deep understanding of the biological process that has gone wrong in a particular disease?
The authors of the articles quoted above eloquently describe how our system has been broken by policies that were based on the belief that the U.S. biomedical research enterprise would expand indefinitely. This assumption seemed to be true for several decades, but has expansion has stalled and reversed in the 2000’s. This system has trained far more researchers for academic research than there are academic positions. Most of us in academic research are not in it for the money and many of us (myself included) have not thought much about how to plan a lucrative career. We do research the most difficult questions because we LOVE to solve problems and learn. The current system relies on this to produce a steady stream of smart, creative, hardworking, and eager people to do important work with minimal pay, and dwindling career opportunities.
Although career opportunities outside academia are more abundant, graduate programs in biomedical research typically do not prepare trainees for positions in industry, policy, or intellectual property. If talented researchers are not prepared and matched to these positions, we as a society have wasted our investment in their training. This is one of the main reasons for the Rutgers iJOBS program. I am taking advantage of iJOBS events because although I’m a senior postdoc, I still know little about opportunities outside academia. That’s like a film major knowing only about low-paying indie film jobs and knowing virtually nothing about the more lucrative jobs in advertising or industrial videos…
What are some ways in which the U.S. biomedical research enterprise can fix itself? You should read the articles (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/7/1912.full and http://www.pnas.org/content/111/16/5773 ) to find some suggestions offered by the authors. However, although they are heavy hitters in academic research, they can’t think of everything, now can they?
Fortunately, as I just mentioned, we are all smart, creative, hardworking, people eager to solve difficult problems! That’s why Alberts et al have created a website to collect ideas and suggestions from us, a call to action! Please share your ideas, and keep abreast of developments in the state of the biomedical workforce at rescuingbiomedicalresearch.org.
Hey, I bet YOU are one of those smart, creative hardworking, eager people. We can solve our own problems! What are your thoughts on your career opportunities, and on problems facing biomedical researchers?--RO