Place yourself, for a moment, in the lab coat of a US postdoctoral fellow. You've just spent four to seven years working on your graduate-school dissertation, but the journey is not yet complete. At a time when many of your friends are making good money at real jobs, you have to work in another laboratory for almost the same time it took to complete grad school. Fail to receive funding and publish frequently, and your dream of one day heading your own lab will go up in smoke. The odds are stacked against you - and the roughly 45,000 other postdocs in the country. The most recent data from the National Science Foundation show that, of those who were postdocs in 2001, less than one-quarter had moved into a tenure-track university position two years later.
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