As a scientific researcher with experience in academia, industry and government I have had the good fortune of social interactions with very accomplished families who have high achieving children. The public high school my kids attended has a very successful math club that annually places several students into MIT and a similar number into the Ivies/Stanford. These kids were doing calculus as high school freshmen and sophomores.
What I am finding disturbing is that most of these extraordinarily talented kids are going to financial firms and consultant groups where they will be making rich people wealthier. This is a huge difference from when I was growing up where the best and brightest wanted to work for NASA or at the turn of century when everyone’s goal was Silicon Valley.
The most talented young Americans are choosing not to make things but would rather shuffle money around because that is where the wealth and prestige are these days. I know so many kids who have interned at Google and Apple, but still ended up working for Mckinsey and KPMG. That’s why American research, both public and private, is so dependent now on equally talented youth from India and China, but we are foolishly turning those people away.
I have never seen a more discouraged scientific community, at least in the areas of molecular genetics and biotechnology. There is a general feeling among we rapidly aging senior scientists that there is no future for cutting edge research in the U.S. as the young talent pool is drying up.
In the broad view, that is what everyone does, who works for someone else, whether they develop a new drug, or screw on lugnuts: spend their life making a rich person richer. The US tax code incentivizes income from financial manipulation over production, so we get more financial manipulation, and less production.
As offered before, the trend now is to offshore “knowledge work”. People offshore are educated at someone else’s expense, and they often work cheaper than USians, so that is what USian “JCs” want to do, to make themselves richer.
The long, exploitive slog in science of graduate school followed by years of post-doc at low pay is finally being discussed in public. (Although the system has been in place for years.) Talented American students see this and reasonably say, “What’s the point? I don’t want to be exploited and depressed for years. It makes more sense to go right for the money from the get-go.”
Will the American academic system adapt to retain the talented students? Obviously they won’t.
Wendy
Nope, never thought of a concept that would get traction, or the capital. Best idea I ever had was in the spring of 77. Boomboxes were the new thing. I was looking all over for a really compact, stereo cassette player, without speakers, that I could use headphones with. People looked at me like I was nuts. I got as far as looking around the RS I worked in, to see if everything I needed to home brew one was available. It was. But $50 was a lot of money in those days, so I never put one together.
The other missed opportunity, was in the mid 80s, when the first thing out of everyone’s mouth, when they came in, looking for a computer, was “is it IBM compatible?” According to Google’s IA thing, 10 shares of MSFT, at the IPO price, would be worth $11,174,400 today.
When Bill Gates “left” Microsoft, i.e. stepped down fro running it day to day, his financial advisors told him he should diversify his portfolio which was entirely Microsoft at that point, because “you never know.” And there are plenty of stories of people who were “one stock rich” only to end up poor because: Enron or Worldcom or even not-fraud companies that just went toes up suddenly.
So he did.
If he hadn’t, based on current share price, he would be worth $1.4 TRILLION, or Four Musks. And would still probably be admirable because he’s not a jerk.
Don’t understand your point. Scientific research in the business world isn’t being done by MBAs or terminal bachelor degrees, other than at the technician level. Identifying problems, designing a research strategy, and analyzing the results is still done by folks with advanced degrees. All my collaborators in industry have PhDs.
Learning how to do basic research as a career is hard. That is because there is limited research money available and the competition is fierce. The problem America faces is that the future success of the modern economy depends on a productive scientific research infrastructure. This occurs at two levels. The first is applied research that focuses on issues that will give an immediate beneficial result. This is mostly what businesses do. The second is basic research done primarily in universities and some government labs that focuses on a better understanding of nature without regard to whether there is an obvious benefit.
Basic research led to an understanding of RNA structure, lipid bilayers, and protein synthesis. Applied research put these concepts together to create the Covid RNA vaccine. Applied research leads to incremental improvements—faster and cheaper computers. Basic research leads to paradigm shifts and quantum leaps in technology–the shifts from floppy disks to flash drives to the cloud.
Basic research is foundational to a successful technological economy but is harder to justify to people who don’t understand science and how technology evolves. Not surprising then that when such people are in power, America’s basic research support is rapidly eroding. How do you justify allocating money to research that doesn’t lead to an obvious beneficial product?
About 30 years ago, the federal government funded research on why some obscure bacteria were resistant to some obscure viruses for the sole reason of expanding scientific knowledge. This eventually resulted in Crispr technology and genetic editing. Who could have guessed?
China and India understand this and are resolutely building out their scientific infrastructure with the goal of dominating the future technological world. America, not so much any more.
@btresist I agree with everything you wrote. Your original topic isn’t the Macro impact of basic research. Your topic is the very personal, Micro-level decision of talented individuals to choose to go into basic research (at the personal sacrifice of years of income) or to go into money-making fields like financial management or corporate research (which, as you pointed out, is short-term oriented).
I personally made the decision to go into corporate research when I came to that choice. I didn’t have the passion to do basic research for years, paid next to nothing while the professor would garner all the credit for any discoveries. Once I began working for the corporation (Ciba-Geigy, now Novartis), I got higher pay, free educational benefits plus little perks like a morning coffee cart. Plus a much happier work environment. I loved it.
The unhappiness among science postdocs is now being studied and publicized.
A 2020 international postdoc survey by Nature revealed that 51% of respondents had considered leaving research due to work-related mental health concerns.
Other studies have found that up to 39% of postdocs experience depressive symptoms, and a similar percentage experience anxiety.
The competitiveness, low pay and insecurity of science academics is finally being publicized. A young person would need to be fanatically dedicated (almost like an artist) to make the personal sacrifice to go into academic science. Just ask Google Gemini the simple comment “Science postdocs and depression” and in one second you will get a long list of specific reasons to not become a science research postdoc.
Same problem. A BS in chemistry qualifies you to be a lab tech. In most cases you need a PhD and at least one post-doc. Time-wise it is like going to medical school, but pay-wise it isn’t that great. Starting salaries for a firefighter in Seattle are much higher than for a PhD chemist.
@syke6 back in the day, the salary for a chemical sales rep with a B.S. was higher than the research chemist with an M.S. When I discovered that from an in-house job posting it didn’t take long for me to switch career paths. Chemical sales rep by day, MBA student by night. Bought my first house at age 29.
Eventually, product manager because I really do like hands-on work.
Wendy
Makes sense. You’re still living like a college student while your friends are buying cars and houses and maybe starting families.
Facing the reality of that, instead of pursuing chemistry, right out of college I got job in environmental consulting. I told one of my professors about it and he said “that’s more than I make.” And I wasn’t making very much.
For a long time I counseled kids only to be a chemistry major if they intended to go to medical school. But I’ve rethought that as well. A physician neighbor was a music major in college. For the music degree, she had to take a certain number of credits outside the department, which happened to match with the number of pre-med credits she needed. Being a music major sounds way more fun than a chemistry major.
I was pre-med because I love medicine. I had a double major in chemistry and biology and scored in the 99th percentile on the MCAT. But then someone told me that interns worked 36-hour shifts. I’m a zombie if I don’t get 8 hours of sleep a night so I switched to chem grad school.
I simply can’t believe that a music major who took a few required science courses could understand medicine on the same level. I have a young cousin who did something similar (I forget her major, maybe psychology) and her M.D. gets the same stamp of approval as someone who actually studied biochemistry.
Wendy
It is a great career if you are really good and a bit lucky. That said, my advice to students over the past decade is that if you haven’t demonstrated yourself as being exceptional by the middle of grad school, academia is probably not in your future.
My point is that for decades now there have been fewer academic research positions open than the number of people going through the education pipeline wanting to do the work. This has led to low wages in an almost endless series of post-doc appointments.
Because of this supply/demand imbalance many switch over the the industrial R&D side. Some of those end up as quants on Wall Street, but most don’t.
What you are missing is that no matter how many academic or business research positions are available, one still has to get through 4-5 years of grad school and at least one 1-2 year post-doc in order to be adequately trained. As I said, learning how to do high level scientific research is hard. The difference today is that because of an aging population and reductions in research funding, academic positions are in decline so folks end up having to do multiple post-docs. The current prohibition against foreign students will only exacerbate this decline.
Academic research has always been a very competitive field. It takes a lot of talent and drive to be successful and the problem is that one often doesn’t find out whether one has the “right stuff” until late in the game.
Here are the points I am making. I believe academic research has played a foundational role in maintaining America’s technological and economic dominance since WWII. That is in large part due to a large chunk of our “best and brightest” wanting to do the research that have generated paradigm-shifts in technology. That has not been the case for a couple of decades now. Instead our American-born best are going into finance to reap the enormous wealth being generated.
We’ve been able to compensate for this by bringing in the best and brightest from the rest of the world to do our research. Well, that is now coming to an end in what I consider to be one of the stupidest policy decisions in our history.
The only possible outcome for this policy is mediocrity and decline.
Not missing that at all. What I’m saying is that is (and has been for decades) a surplus of people who want to go through that long process and do academic research, compared to the number of openings. The surplus either become permanent post-docs or move to industry/government jobs.