As the economics of science in the United States changes, so too does the scientific enterprise. There are more authors per paper, more graduate schools, more postdocs. Yet there are relatively few entry-level faculty positions. Meanwhile, in areas such as biomedical research, large-scale investment continues to increase significantly. Nowhere is the bittersweet mix of bulging budgets and postdoc proliferation more apparent than in the life sciences, where the prospective investigator faces an often frustrating journey. A serious, system-wide post-postdoc bottleneck is changing the composition of temporary, permanent and student workers in the lab. "The operating model of science has changed," says Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "It's not just an NIH issue. I think it's really a systemic issue." As research teams grow larger and require more complex skill sets, they need more postdocs and graduate students, who in turn take longer to complete training.
展开▼
