7 ms·

Is it really a problem if government scientists leave for industry?

nmrm2 11y ago
1. It's a problem for students who invested their time (and possibly money, but certainly opporunity cost) in this training. "Sucks for them, not my problem" is 1) excessively uncharitable, and 2) confuses personal interest with overall social goodness. Don't get me wrong -- it's totally understandable for you to say "is that really a problem that we should try to fix?". And in a lot of cases I probably even agree with you! But it's less understandable for you to simply say "that's not a problem". 2. Suppose you don't care about providing steady scientific employment for individual scientists but do value scientific progress (I find this position contradictory to the point of absurdity, but let's roll with it). Even in this case, cyclical funding cuts are still a source of waste: a) society essentially wasted money subsidizing the education of people who are now not using their training (some might be, but probably many aren't). b) funding freezes are often temporary, but by the time spending rebounds all those scientists you spent billions of dollars training have moved on to indsutry (research or no). So now you have to double down and train a new generation in order to make progress.
- dekhn 11y ago
  Yeah, my plan was always to get a full professor position at a mid-tier university. Had I known the NIH budget would have been frozen, I would have not gone to grad school and instead worked for Yahoo pre-IPO, and today I'd be a many-times-over millionaire funding a new crop of scientists out of my money.
  - sjg007 11y ago
    I did the same. Interestingly you can always go back to grad school, get a PhD and even become a professor after you're rich.. Probably easier too.
dekhn 11y ago
I might not have made it clear, but these are academic scientists who were funded by government, but were unable to transition from grad school or postdoc to Professor because of a high level of competition due to frozen number of professor positions. It's not clear to me whether it's bad for academic scientists to leave for industry- that includes me and a number of people I have recruited from academia to work in industry. It's worked well for me, but it was very unpleasant for my cohort to expect to become professors, when they couldn't, due to the NIH budget freeze.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  > unable to transition from grad school or postdoc to Professor But were they all intending to do that in the first place? Do you think most people who go to graduate school are intending to become academics? Lots of people say that, but it's not what I see in PhD students - many want to go into industry from the start.
  - dekhn 11y ago
    In my field- biophysics- and also in the larger bio field, the vast majority of PhD recipients intend to go on to be professors, or research scientists at a national lab (I went the latter route when the former turned out to be too hard), rather than academia. Nearly every single person who graduated in my program went on to do either med school (to be a research MD), or postdoc (path to professor). Now, my school was in SF, so a fair number of people were highly incentivized to start companies (NOT go work for companies- to be founders), but I'd say that's rare and fairly specific to prestigious programs in larger cities/higher profile universities. I don't know a single person in my program who actually said they wanted to work in industry (other than the company founders). Perhaps it's different in other fields.
    - sjg007 11y ago
      I think research md is the field to be in. Md/phd. Plenty of jobs always in demand.
astazangasta 11y ago
As a long-time academic, yes. Industry does not do research of the same quality as academia; they will not approach as broad a range of questions. No industry would build a large hadron collider, or investigate obscure metabolic pathways or bacterial coat proteins with no known product development goals. Academic freedom doesn't exist in industry. Furthermore, industry is notoriously tight with the results it produces; even if, internally, it's producing good science, the fact that this science isn't being broadly shared with other people is a huge drag on the pace of progress. Academic openness is indispensible to scientific advancements.
- dekhn 11y ago
  That doesn't address the underlying point which is that if there's not enough faculty or research positions, people can't stay in academia to do that great research. That's why government funding is so key.

nmrm2 11y ago

1. It's a problem for students who invested their time (and possibly money, but certainly opporunity cost) in this training. "Sucks for them, not my problem" is 1) excessively uncharitable, and 2) confuses personal interest with overall social goodness. Don't get me wrong -- it's totally understandable for you to say "is that really a problem that we should try to fix?". And in a lot of cases I probably even agree with you! But it's less understandable for you to simply say "that's not a problem". 2. Suppose you don't care about providing steady scientific employment for individual scientists but do value scientific progress (I find this position contradictory to the point of absurdity, but let's roll with it). Even in this case, cyclical funding cuts are still a source of waste: a) society essentially wasted money subsidizing the education of people who are now not using their training (some might be, but probably many aren't). b) funding freezes are often temporary, but by the time spending rebounds all those scientists you spent billions of dollars training have moved on to indsutry (research or no). So now you have to double down and train a new generation in order to make progress.

dekhn 11y ago
Yeah, my plan was always to get a full professor position at a mid-tier university. Had I known the NIH budget would have been frozen, I would have not gone to grad school and instead worked for Yahoo pre-IPO, and today I'd be a many-times-over millionaire funding a new crop of scientists out of my money.
- sjg007 11y ago
  I did the same. Interestingly you can always go back to grad school, get a PhD and even become a professor after you're rich.. Probably easier too.

dekhn 11y ago

I might not have made it clear, but these are academic scientists who were funded by government, but were unable to transition from grad school or postdoc to Professor because of a high level of competition due to frozen number of professor positions. It's not clear to me whether it's bad for academic scientists to leave for industry- that includes me and a number of people I have recruited from academia to work in industry. It's worked well for me, but it was very unpleasant for my cohort to expect to become professors, when they couldn't, due to the NIH budget freeze.

chrisseaton 11y ago
> unable to transition from grad school or postdoc to Professor But were they all intending to do that in the first place? Do you think most people who go to graduate school are intending to become academics? Lots of people say that, but it's not what I see in PhD students - many want to go into industry from the start.
- dekhn 11y ago
  In my field- biophysics- and also in the larger bio field, the vast majority of PhD recipients intend to go on to be professors, or research scientists at a national lab (I went the latter route when the former turned out to be too hard), rather than academia. Nearly every single person who graduated in my program went on to do either med school (to be a research MD), or postdoc (path to professor). Now, my school was in SF, so a fair number of people were highly incentivized to start companies (NOT go work for companies- to be founders), but I'd say that's rare and fairly specific to prestigious programs in larger cities/higher profile universities. I don't know a single person in my program who actually said they wanted to work in industry (other than the company founders). Perhaps it's different in other fields.
  - sjg007 11y ago
    I think research md is the field to be in. Md/phd. Plenty of jobs always in demand.

astazangasta 11y ago

As a long-time academic, yes. Industry does not do research of the same quality as academia; they will not approach as broad a range of questions. No industry would build a large hadron collider, or investigate obscure metabolic pathways or bacterial coat proteins with no known product development goals. Academic freedom doesn't exist in industry. Furthermore, industry is notoriously tight with the results it produces; even if, internally, it's producing good science, the fact that this science isn't being broadly shared with other people is a huge drag on the pace of progress. Academic openness is indispensible to scientific advancements.

dekhn 11y ago
That doesn't address the underlying point which is that if there's not enough faculty or research positions, people can't stay in academia to do that great research. That's why government funding is so key.